The Mahler volume of a centrally symmetric convex body K is defined as M(K)= (Vol K)(Vol K^dual). Mahler conjectured that this volume is minimized when K is a cube. We introduce the bottleneck conjecture, which stipulates that a certain convex body K^diamond subset K X K^dual has least volume when K is an ellipsoid. If true, the bottleneck conjecture would strengthen the best current lower bound on the Mahler volume due to Bourgain and Milman. We also generalize the bottleneck conjecture in the context of indefinite orthogonal geometry and prove some special cases of the generalization.
We establish a version of the bottleneck conjecture, which in turn implies a partial solution to the Mahler conjecture on the product $v(K) = (\Vol K)(\Vol K^\circ)$ of the volume of a symmetric convex body $K \in \R^n$ and its polar body $K^\circ$. The Mahler conjecture asserts that the Mahler volume $v(K)$ is minimized (non-uniquely) when $K$ is an $n$-cube. The bottleneck conjecture (in its least general form) asserts that the volume of a certain domain $K^\diamond \subseteq K \times K^\circ$ is minimized when $K$ is an ellipsoid. It implies the Mahler conjecture up to a factor of $(π/4)^n …
We use symplectic techniques to obtain partial results on Mahler's conjecture about the product of the volume of a convex body and the volume of its polar. We confirm the conjecture for hyperplane sections or projections of $\ell_p$-balls or the Hanner polytopes.
In this note we prove some Rogers-Shepard type inequalities for the lengths of shortest closed billiard trajectories, mostly in the planar case. We also establish some properties of closed billiard trajectories in Hanner polytopes, having some significance in the symplectic approach to the Mahler conjecture.
This paper contains a number of results related to volumes of projective perturbations of convex bodies and the Laplace transform on convex cones. First, it is shown that a sharp version of Bourgain's slicing conjecture implies the Mahler conjecture for convex bodies that are not necessarily centrally-symmetric. Second, we find that by slightly translating the polar of a centered convex body, we may obtain another body with a bounded isotropic constant. Third, we provide a counter-example to a conjecture by Kuperberg on the distribution of volume in a body and in its polar.
In this paper, we prove Mahler's conjecture concerning the volume product of centrally symmetric convex bodies in $\mathbb{R}^n$ in the case where $n=3$. Furthermore, we determine the equality condition.
The "Mahler volume" is, intuitively speaking, a measure of how "round" a centrally symmetric convex body is. In one direction this intuition is given weight by a result of Santalo, who in the 1940s showed that the Mahler volume is maximized, in a given dimension, by the unit sphere and its linear images, and only these. A counterpart to this result in the opposite direction is proposed by a conjecture, formulated by Kurt Mahler in the 1930s and still open in dimensions 4 and greater, asserting that the Mahler volume should be minimized by a cuboid. In this article we present a seemingly new pr…
In this note we link symplectic and convex geometry by relating two seemingly different open conjectures: a symplectic isoperimetric-type inequality for convex domains, and Mahler's conjecture on the volume product of centrally symmetric convex bodies. More precisely, we show that if for convex bodies of fixed volume in the classical phase space the Hofer-Zehnder capacity is maximized by the Euclidean ball, then a hypercube is a minimizer for the volume product among centrally symmetric convex bodies.
Following ideas of Iriyeh and Shibata we give a short proof of the three-dimensional Mahler conjecture {\mf for symmetric convex bodies}. Our contributions include, in particular, simple self-contained proofs of their two key statements. The first of these is an equipartition (ham sandwich type) theorem which refines a celebrated result of Hadwiger and, as usual, can be proved using ideas from equivariant topology. The second is an inequality relating the product volume to areas of certain sections and their duals. We observe that these ideas give a large family of convex sets in every dimensi…
We give the sharp lower bound of the volume product of $n$-dimensional convex bodies which are invariant under a discrete subgroup $SO(K)=\{ g \in SO(n); g(K)=K \}$, where $K$ is an $n$-cube or $n$-simplex. This provides new partial results of Mahler's conjecture and its non-symmetric version. In addition, we give partial answers for Viterbo's isoperimetric type conjecture in symplectic geometry from the view point of Mahler's conjecture.
We explore connections furnished by the Funk metric, a relative of the Hilbert metric, between projective geometry, billiards, convex geometry and affine inequalities. We first show that many metric invariants of the Funk metric are invariant under projective transformations as well as projective duality. These include the Holmes-Thompson volume and surface area of convex subsets, and the length spectrum of their boundary, extending results of Holmes-Thompson and Álvarez Paiva on Schäffer's dual girth conjecture. We explore in particular Funk billiards, which generalize hyperbolic billiards in…
In this note, we show that the strong Viterbo conjecture holds true on any convex toric domain, and that the Viterbo's volume-capacity conjecture holds for the product of a $1$-unconditional convex body $A\subset\mathbb{R}^{n}$ and its polar. We also give a direct calculus proof of the symmetric Mahler conjecture for $l_p$-balls.
Mahler's conjecture asks whether the cube is a minimizer for the volume product of a body and its polar in the class of symmetric convex bodies in R^n. The corresponding inequality to the conjecture is sometimes called the the reverse Blaschke-Santalo inequality. The conjecture is known in dimension two and in several special cases. In the class of unconditional convex bodies, Saint Raymond confirmed the conjecture, and Meyer and Reisner, independently, characterized the equality case. In this paper we present a stability version of these results and also show that any symmetric convex body, w…
Mahler's conjecture asks whether the cube is a minimizer for the volume product of a body and its polar in the class of symmetric convex bodies in a fixed dimension. It is known that every Hanner polytope has the same volume product as the cube or the cross-polytope. In this paper we prove that every Hanner polytope is a strict local minimizer for the volume product in the class of symmetric convex bodies endowed with the Banach-Mazur distance.
Our purpose here is to give an overview of known results and open questions concerning the volume product ${\mathcal P}(K)=\min_{z\in K}{\rm vol}(K){\rm vol}((K-z)^*)$ of a convex body $K$ in ${\mathbb R}^n$. We present a number of upper and lower bounds for ${\mathcal P}(K)$, in particular, we discuss the Mahler's conjecture on the lower bound of ${\mathcal P}(K)$, which is still open. We also show connections of ${\mathcal P}(K)$ with different parts of modern mathematics, including Geometric Number Theory, Convex Geometry, Analysis, Harmonic Analysis as well as Systolic and Symplectic Geome…
We give the sharp lower bound of the volume product of three dimensional convex bodies which are invariant under a discrete subgroup of $O(3)$ in several cases. We also characterize the convex bodies with the minimal volume product in each case. In particular, this provides a new partial result of the non-symmetric version of Mahler's conjecture in the three dimensional case.
In 1978, Makai Jr. established a remarkable connection between the volume-product of a convex body, its maximal lattice packing density and the minimal density of a lattice arrangement of its polar body intersecting every affine hyperplane. Consequently, he formulated a conjecture that can be seen as a dual analog of Minkowski's fundamental theorem, and which is strongly linked to the well-known Mahler-conjecture. Based on the covering minima of Kannan & Lovász and a problem posed by Fejes Tóth, we arrange Makai Jr.'s conjecture into a wider context and investigate densities of lattice arrange…
We explore a natural generalization of systolic geometry to Finsler metrics and optical hypersurfaces with special emphasis on its relation to the Mahler conjecture and the geometry of numbers. In particular, we show that if an optical hypersurface of contact type in the cotangent bundle of the 2-dimensional torus encloses a volume $V$, then it carries a periodic characteristic whose action is at most $\sqrt{V/3}$. This result is deduced from an interesting dual version of Minkowski's lattice-point theorem: if the origin is the unique integer point in the interior of a planar convex body, the …
The goal of this paper is to study geometric and extremal properties of the convex body $B_{\mathcal F(M)}$, which is the unit ball of the Lipschitz-free Banach space associated with a finite metric space $M$. We investigate $\ell_1$ and $\ell_\infty$-sums, in particular we characterize the metric spaces such that $B_{\mathcal F(M)}$ is a Hanner polytope. We also characterize the finite metric spaces whose Lipschitz-free spaces are isometric. We discuss the extreme properties of the volume product $\mathcal{P}(M)=|B_{\mathcal F(M)}|\cdot|B_{\mathcal F(M)}^\circ|$, when the number of elements o…
We explore an interplay between an analysis of diffusion flows such as Ornstein--Uhlenbeck flow and Fokker--Planck flow and inequalities from convex geometry regarding the volume product. More precisely, we introduce new types of hypercontractivity for the Ornstein--Uhlenbeck flow and clarify how these imply the Blaschke--Santaló inequality and the inverse Santaló inequality, also known as Mahler's conjecture. Motivated the link, we establish two types of new hypercontractivity in this paper. The first one is an improvement of Borell's reverse hypercontractivity inequality in terms of Nelson's…
