Circumscribing Polygons and Polygonizations for Disjoint Line Segments

Given a planar straight-line graph G=(V,E)\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$G=(V,E)$$\end{document} in R2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbb {R}^2$$\end{document}, a circumscribing polygon of G is a simple polygon P whose vertex set is V, and every edge in E is either an edge or an internal diagonal of P. A circumscribing polygon is a polygonization for G if every edge in E is an edge of P. We prove that every arrangement of n disjoint line segments in the plane has a subset of size Ω(n)\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\Omega (\sqrt{n})$$\end{document} that admits a circumscribing polygon, which is the first improvement on this bound in 20 years. We explore relations between circumscribing polygons and other problems in combinatorial geometry, and generalizations to R3\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbb {R}^3$$\end{document}. We show that it is NP-complete to decide whether a given graph G admits a circumscribing polygon, even if G is 2-regular. Settling a 30-year old conjecture by Rappaport, we also show that it is NP-complete to determine whether a geometric matching admits a polygonization.