English

Lonely Runner Polyhedra

Combinatorics 2020-01-01 v4 Number Theory

Abstract

We study the \emph{Lonely Runner Conjecture}, conceived by J\"org M.~Wills in the 1960's: Given positive integers n1,n2,,nkn_1, n_2, \dots, n_k, there exists a positive real number tt such that for all 1jk1 \le j \le k the distance of tnjt \, n_j to the nearest integer is at least 1k+1\frac{ 1 }{ k+1 }. Continuing a view-obstruction approach by Cusick and recent work by Henze and Malikiosis, our goal is to promote a polyhedral \emph{ansatz} to the Lonely Runner Conjecture. Our results include geometric proofs of some folklore results that are only implicit in the existing literature, a new family of affirmative instances defined by the parities of the speeds, and geometrically motivated conjectures whose resolution would shed further light on the Lonely Runner Conjecture.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1606.01783,
  title  = {Lonely Runner Polyhedra},
  author = {Matthias Beck and Serkan Hosten and Matthias Schymura},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.01783},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

9 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:18:42.600Z