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Spherical coverings and X-raying convex bodies of constant width

Part of: Discrete geometry General convexity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2021

Andriy Bondarenko ,
Andriy Prymak Open the ORCID record for Andriy Prymak [Opens in a new window]  and
Danylo Radchenko
Andriy Bondarenko
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway e-mail: [email protected]
Andriy Prymak*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2, Canada
Danylo Radchenko
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, ETH Zurich, Zurich 8092, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Bezdek and Kiss showed that existence of origin-symmetric coverings of unit sphere in ${\mathbb {E}}^n$ by at most $2^n$ congruent spherical caps with radius not exceeding $\arccos \sqrt {\frac {n-1}{2n}}$ implies the X-ray conjecture and the illumination conjecture for convex bodies of constant width in ${\mathbb {E}}^n$ , and constructed such coverings for $4\le n\le 6$ . Here, we give such constructions with fewer than $2^n$ caps for $5\le n\le 15$ .

For the illumination number of any convex body of constant width in ${\mathbb {E}}^n$ , Schramm proved an upper estimate with exponential growth of order $(3/2)^{n/2}$ . In particular, that estimate is less than $3\cdot 2^{n-2}$ for $n\ge 16$ , confirming the abovementioned conjectures for the class of convex bodies of constant width. Thus, our result settles the outstanding cases $7\le n\le 15$ .

We also show how to calculate the covering radius of a given discrete point set on the sphere efficiently on a computer.

Keywords

Spherical covering radiusX-ray problemillumination problemconvex bodies of constant width

MSC classification

Primary: 52C17: Packing and covering in $n$ dimensions
Secondary: 52A20: Convex sets in $n$ dimensions (including convex hypersurfaces) 52A40: Inequalities and extremum problems 52C35: Arrangements of points, flats, hyperplanes
Type
Article
Information
Canadian Mathematical Bulletin , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , December 2022 , pp. 860 - 866
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Copyright
© Canadian Mathematical Society, 2021

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Footnotes

The first author was supported in part by Grant 275113 of the Research Council of Norway. The second author was supported by NSERC of Canada Discovery Grant RGPIN-2020-05357.

References

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