Cardinalities of k-distance sets in Minkowski spaces Original Research Article

A subset of a metric space is a k-distance set if there are exactly k non-zero distances occurring between points. We conjecture that a k-distance set in a d-dimensional Banach space (or Minkowski space), contains at most (k − 1)d points, with equality iff the unit ball is a parallelotope. We solve this conjecture in the affirmative for all two-dimensional spaces and for spaces where the unit ball is a parallelotope. For general spaces we find various weaker upper bounds for k-distance sets.