A "spectral convex set" is a collection of symmetric matrices whose range of eigenvalues form a symmetric convex set. Spectral convex sets generalize the Schur-Horn orbitopes studied by Sanyal-Sottile-Sturmfels (2011). We study this class of convex bodies, which is closed under intersections, polarity, and Minkowski sums. We describe orbits of faces and give a formula for their Steiner polynomials. We then focus on spectral polyhedra. We prove that spectral polyhedra are spectrahedra and give small representations as spectrahedral shadows. We close with observations and questions regarding hyperbolicity cones, polar convex bodies, and spectral zonotopes.
This is an extended version of a talk on October 4, 2004 at the research seminar ``Differential geometry and applications'' (headed by Academician A. T. Fomenko) at Moscow State University. The paper contains an overview of available (but far from well-known) results about the Blaschke addition of convex bodies, some new theorems on the monotonicity of the volume of convex bodies (in particular, convex polyhedra with parallel faces) as well as description of a software for visualization of polyhedra with prescribed outward normals and face areas.
In this paper we develop a concrete way to construct bodies of constant width in dimension three. They are constructed from special embeddings of self-dual graphs.
We study two notions. One is that of spindle convexity. A set of circumradius not greater than one is spindle convex if, for any pair of its points, it contains every short circular arc of radius at least one, connecting them. The other objects of study are bodies obtained as intersections of finitely many balls of the same radius, called ball-polyhedra. We find analogues of several results on convex polyhedral sets for ball-polyhedra.
In this note we introduce the problem of illumination of convex bodies in spherical spaces and solve it for a large subfamily of convex bodies. We derive from it a combinatorial version of the classical illumination problem for convex bodies in Euclidean spaces as well as a solution to that for a large subfamily of convex bodies, which in dimension three leads to special Koebe polyhedra.
We give the quasi--Euclidean classification of the maximal (with respect to the $f$--vector) alcoved polyhedra. The $f$--vector of these maximal convex bodies is $(20,30,12)$, so they are simple dodecahedra. We find eight quasi--Euclidean classes. This classification, which preserves angles, is finer than the known combinatorial classification (found in 2012 by Jiménez and de la Puente), which has only six classes. Each alcoved polyhedron $\mathcal{P}$ is represented by a unique visualized idempotent matrix $A$. Some 2--minors of $A$ are invariants of $\mathcal{P}$: they are the tropical edge-…
Answering a question of Conway and Guy in a 1968 paper, Lángi in 2021 proved the existence of a monostable polyhedron with $n$-fold rotational symmetry for any $n \geq 3$, and arbitrarily close to a Euclidean ball. In this paper we strengthen this result by characterizing the possible symmetry groups of all mono-monostatic smooth convex bodies and convex polyhedra. Our result also answers a stronger version of the question of Conway and Guy, asked in the above paper of Lángi.
The mean width is a measure on three-dimensional convex bodies that enjoys equal status with volume and surface area [Rota]. As the phrase suggests, it is the mean of a probability density f. We verify formulas for mean widths of the regular tetrahedron and the cube. Higher-order moments of f_tetra and f_cube have not been examined until now. Assume that each polyhedron has edges of unit length. We deduce that the mean square width of the regular tetrahedron is 1/3+(3+sqrt(3))/(3*pi) and the mean square width of the cube is 1+4/pi.
A convex polyhedron is called monostable if it can rest in stable position only on one of its faces. The aim of this paper is to investigate three questions of Conway, regarding monostable polyhedra, which first appeared in a 1969 paper of Goldberg and Guy (M. Goldberg and R.K. Guy, Stability of polyhedra (J.H. Conway and R.K. Guy), SIAM Rev. 11 (1969), 78-82). In this note we answer two of these problems and make a conjecture about the third one. The main tool of our proof is a general theorem describing approximations of smooth convex bodies by convex polyhedra in terms of their static equil…
In this paper we solve several reverse isoperimetric problems in the class of $λ$-convex bodies, i.e., convex bodies whose curvature at each point of their boundary is bounded below by some $λ> 0$. We give an affirmative answer in $\mathbb{R}^3$ to a conjecture due to Borisenko which states that the $λ$-convex lens, i.e., the intersection of two balls of radius $1/λ$, is the unique minimizer of volume among all $λ$-convex bodies of given surface area. Also, we prove a reverse inradius inequality: in model spaces of constant curvature and arbitrary dimension, we show that the $λ$-convex lens (p…
The aim of this note is to investigate the properties of the convex hull and the homothetic convex hull functions of a convex body $K$ in Euclidean $n$-space, defined as the volume of the union of $K$ and one of its translates, and the volume of $K$ and a translate of a homothetic copy of $K$, respectively, as functions of the translation vector. In particular, we prove that the convex hull function of the body $K$ does not determine $K$. Furthermore, we prove the equivalence of the polar projection body problem raised by Petty, and a conjecture of G.Horváth and Lángi about translative constan…
We characterize fundamental domains of affine reflection groups as those polyhedral convex bodies which support a continuous billiard dynamics. We interpret this characterization in the broader context of Alexandrov geometry and prove an analogous characterization for isosceles tetrahedra in terms of continuous quasigeodesic flows. Moreover, we show an optimal regularity result for convex bodies: the billiard dynamics is continuous if the boundary is of class $\mathcal{C}^{2,1}$. In particular, billiard trajectories converge to geodesics on the boundary in this case. Our proof of the latter co…
Nonlinear eigenvalue problems for pairs of homogeneous convex functions are particular nonlinear constrained optimization problems that arise in a variety of settings, including graph mining, machine learning, and network science. By considering different notions of duality transforms from both classical and recent convex geometry theory, in this work we show that one can move from the primal to the dual nonlinear eigenvalue formulation maintaining the spectrum, the variational spectrum as well as the corresponding multiplicities unchanged. These nonlinear spectral duality properties can be us…
A set $Ω\subset \mathbb{R}^d$ is said to be spectral if the space $L^2(Ω)$ has an orthogonal basis of exponential functions. A conjecture due to Fuglede (1974) stated that $Ω$ is a spectral set if and only if it can tile the space by translations. While this conjecture was disproved for general sets, it has long been known that for a convex body $Ω\subset \mathbb{R}^d$ the "tiling implies spectral" part of the conjecture is in fact true. To the contrary, the "spectral implies tiling" direction of the conjecture for convex bodies was proved only in $\mathbb{R}^2$, and also in $\mathbb{R}^3$ und…
