Cutting lemma and Zarankiewicz’s problem in distal structures

Abstract

We establish a cutting lemma for definable families of sets in distal structures, as well as the optimality of the distal cell decomposition for definable families of sets on the plane in o-minimal expansions of fields. Using it, we generalize the results in Fox et al. (J Eur Math Soc 19(6):1785–1810, 2017 ) on the semialgebraic planar Zarankiewicz problem to arbitrary o-minimal structures, in particular obtaining an o-minimal generalization of the Szemeredi–Trotter theorem.