English

Functional John and L\"owner conditions for pairs of log-concave functions

Metric Geometry 2023-12-01 v2 Functional Analysis

Abstract

John's fundamental theorem characterizing the largest volume ellipsoid contained in a convex body KK in Rd\mathbb{R}^d has seen several generalizations and extensions. One direction, initiated by V. Milman is to replace ellipsoids by positions (affine images) of another body LL. Another, more recent direction is to consider logarithmically concave functions on Rd\mathbb{R}^d instead of convex bodies: we designate some special, radially symmetric log-concave function gg as the analogue of the Euclidean ball, and want to find its largest integral position under the constraint that it is pointwise below some given log-concave function ff. We follow both directions simultaneously: we consider the functional question, and allow essentially any meaningful function to play the role of gg above. Our general theorems jointly extend known results in both directions. The dual problem in the setting of convex bodies asks for the smallest volume ellipsoid, called \emph{L{\"o}wner's ellipsoid}, containing KK. We consider the analogous problem for functions: we characterize the solutions of the optimization problem of finding a smallest integral position of some log-concave function gg under the constraint that it is pointwise above ff. It turns out that in the functional setting, the relationship between the John and the L{\"o}wner problems is more intricate than it is in the setting of convex bodies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2212.11781,
  title  = {Functional John and L\"owner conditions for pairs of log-concave functions},
  author = {Grigory Ivanov and Márton Naszódi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.11781},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

34 pages