Paper detail

The right acute angles problem?

The Danzer--Grünbaum acute angles problem asks for the largest size of a set of points in ${\mathbb R}^d$ that determines only acute angles. Recently, the problem was essentially solved thanks to the results of the second author and of Gerencsér and Harangi: now, the lower and the upper bounds are $2^{d-1}+1$ and $2^d-1$, respectively. The lower-bound construction is surprisingly simple. In this note, we suggest the following variant of the problem, which is one way to "save" the problem. Put $F(α) = \lim_{d\to \infty} f(d,α)^{1/d}$, where $f(d,α)$ is the largest set of points in ${\mathbb R}^d$ with no angle greater than $α$. Then the question is to find $c:= \lim_{α\to π/2^-}F(α).$ Although one may expect that $c=2$ in view of the result of Gerencsér and Harangi, the best lower bound we could get is $c\ge \sqrt 2$. We also solve a related problem of Erdos and Füredi on the "stability" of the acute angles problem and refute another conjecture stated in the same paper.