A translation of Henri Joris' "Le chasseur perdu dans la forêt" (1980)

Steven Finch

paper

A translation of Henri Joris' "Le chasseur perdu dans la forêt" (1980)

arXiv:1910.00615

Abstract

This is an English translation of Henri Joris' article "Le chasseur perdu dans la forêt (Un problème de géométrie plane)" that appeared in $E l e m e n t e d er M a t h e ma t ik$ v. 35 (1980) n. 1, 1--14. Given a point $P$ and a line $L$ in the plane, what is the shortest search path to find $L$ , given its distance but not its direction from $P$ ? The shortest search path was described by Isbell (1957), but a complete and detailed proof was not published until Joris (1980). I am thankful to Natalya Pluzhnikov for her dedicated work and to the Swiss Mathematical Society for permission to post this translation on the arXiv.

17 pages, 19 figures