English

A note on the affine-invariant plank problem

Metric Geometry 2024-11-27 v3

Abstract

Suppose that CC is a bounded, convex subset of Rn\mathbb{R}^n, and that P1,,PkP_1, \dots, P_k are planks which cover CC in respective directions v1,,vkv_1, \dots, v_k and with widths w1,,wkw_1, \dots, w_k. In 1951, Bang conjectured that the sum of relative widths i=1kwiwvi(C)1,\sum_{i=1}^k \frac{w_i}{w_{v_i}(C)} \geq 1, generalizing a previous conjecture of Tarski. Here, wvi(C)w_{v_i}(C) is the width of CC in the direction viv_i. In this note we give a short proof of this conjecture under the assumption that, for every mm with 1mk1 \leq m \leq k, Ci=1mPi C \setminus \bigcup_{i = 1}^m P_i is a convex set. In addition, we prove that if the projection of CC onto the vector space spanned by the normal vectors of the planks has dimension dd, then the above sum of relative widths is at least 1/d1/d.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1604.00456,
  title  = {A note on the affine-invariant plank problem},
  author = {Gregory R. Chambers and Lawrence Mouillé},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1604.00456},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

8 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-22T13:23:43.940Z