Uniform distribution and geometric incidence theory

Abstract

A celebrated unit distance conjecture due to Erdős says that the unit distances cannot arise more than Cϵn1+ϵ times (for any ϵ>0) among n points in the Euclidean plane (see e.g. [8] and the references contained therein). In three dimensions, the conjectured bound is Cn43 (see e.g. [6] and [11]). In dimensions four and higher, this problem, in its general formulation, loses meaning because the Lens example shows that one can construct a set of n points in dimension 4 and higher where the unit distance arises ≈n2 times (see e.g. [1]). However, the Lens example is one-dimension in nature, which raises the possibility that the unit distance conjecture is still quite interesting in higher dimensions under additional structural assumptions on the point set. This point of view was explored in [4], [5], [7] and has led to some interesting connections between the unit distance problem and its continuous counterparts, especially the Falconer distance conjecture ([3]). In this paper, we study the unit distance problem and its variants under the assumption that the underlying family of point sets is uniformly distributed. We prove several incidence bounds in this setting and clarify some key properties of uniformly distributed sequences in the context of incidence problems in combinatorial geometry.