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Polynomial Bounds on the Slicing Number

NOTE: Unfortunately, most of the results mentioned here were already known under the name of "d-separated interval piercing". The result that T_d(m) exists was first proved by Gyaŕfaś and Lehel in 1970, see [5]. Later, the result was strengthened by Kaŕolyi and Tardos [9] to match our result. Moreover, their proof (in a different notation, of course) uses ideas very similar to ours and leads to a similar recurrence. Also, our conjecture turns out to be right and was proved for the 2-dimensional case by Tardos and for the general case by Kaiser [8]. An excellent survey article ("Transversals of d-intervals') is available on http://www.renyi.hu/~tardos. Still, we leave this paper available to the public on http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/dawerner, also because one might find the references useful. ----- We study the following Gallai-type of problem: Assume that we are given a family X of convex objects in R^d such that among any subset of size m, there is an axis-parallel hyperplane intersecting at least two of the objects. What can we say about the number of axis-parallel hyperplanes that sufficient to intersect all sets in the family? In this paper, we show that this number T_d(m) exists, i.e., depends only on m and the dimension d, but not on the size of the set X. First, we derive a very weak super-exponential bound. Using this result, by a simple proof we are able to show that this number is even polynomially bounded for any fixed d. We partly answer open problem 74 on http://maven.smith.edu/~orourke/TOPP/, where the planar case is considered, by improving the best known exponential bound to O(m^2).