A Set of Plane Measure Zero Containing all Finite Polygonal Arcs

Abstract

We say a (plane) set A contains all sets of some type if, for each B of type , there is a subset of A that is congruent to B. Recently, Besicovitch and Rado [3] and independently, Kinney [5] have constructed sets of plane measure zero containing all circles. In these papers it is pointed out that the set of all similar rectangles, some sets of confocal conies and other such classes of sets can be contained in sets of plane measure zero, but all these generalizations rely in some way on the symmetry, or similarity of the sets within the given type.In this paper we construct a set of plane measure zero containing all finite polygonal arcs (i.e., the one-dimensional boundaries of all polygons with a finite number of sides) with slightly stronger results if we restrict our attention to k-gons for some fixed k.