UBC Math Department Rising Stars Colloquium: Hong Wang

If E is a compact set of Hausdorff dimension s > 1 on the plane, then its distance set was conjectured (by Falconer 1985) to have positive Lebesgue measure. Joint with Guth, Iosevich and Ou, we show that dim E > 5/4 is a sufficient condition. This improves upon Wolff's result for dim E > 4/3.