Concurrent normals problem for convex polytopes and Euclidean distance degree
Abstract
It is conjectured since long that for any convex body there exists a point in its interior which belongs to at least normals from different points on the boundary of . The conjecture is known to be true for . We treat the same problem for convex polytopes in . 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 has normals to its boundary emanating from some point in its interior. Moreover, we conjecture that each simple polytope in has a point in its interior with 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 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}
}