English

Concurrent normals problem for convex polytopes and Euclidean distance degree

Metric Geometry 2024-08-06 v2 Differential Geometry

Abstract

It is conjectured since long that for any convex body PRnP\subset \mathbb{R}^n there exists a point in its interior which belongs to at least 2n2n normals from different points on the boundary of PP. The conjecture is known to be true for n=2,3,4n=2,3,4. We treat the same problem for convex polytopes in R3\mathbb{R}^3. It turns out that the PL concurrent normals problem differs a lot from the smooth one. One almost immediately proves that a convex polytope in R3\mathbb{R}^3 has 88 normals to its boundary emanating from some point in its interior. Moreover, we conjecture that each simple polytope in R3\mathbb{R}^3 has a point in its interior with 1010 normals to the boundary. We confirm the conjecture for all tetrahedra and triangular prisms and give a sufficient condition for a simple polytope to have a point with 1010 normals. Other related topics (average number of normals, minimal number of normals from an interior point, other dimensions) are discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.01773,
  title  = {Concurrent normals problem for convex polytopes and Euclidean distance degree},
  author = {Ivan Nasonov and Gaiane Panina and Dirk Siersma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.01773},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:52:00.352Z