English

$\varepsilon$-neighbourhoods in the Plane with a Nowhere-smooth Boundary

Metric Geometry 2025-11-18 v2

Abstract

We give an example of a planar set ER2E\subset \mathbb{R}^2 for which the boundary Eε\partial E_\varepsilon of its ε\varepsilon-neighbourhood Eε={xR2:dist(x,E)ε}E_\varepsilon = \{x \in \mathbb{R}^2 \, : \, \textrm{dist}(x, E) \leq \varepsilon \} is nowhere C1C^1-smooth, in the sense that the set of singularities on the boundary is countably dense (where we note that the latter set cannot be uncountable). Furthermore, we give an example of a planar set EE for which Eε\partial E_\varepsilon has the same properties as above, but in addition contains an uncountable subset, with non-integer Hausdorff dimension, where curvature is not defined. Both constructions make use of a characterisation of those star-shaped sets that are an ε\varepsilon-neighbourhood of one of their subsets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.09046,
  title  = {$\varepsilon$-neighbourhoods in the Plane with a Nowhere-smooth Boundary},
  author = {Jeroen S. W. Lamb and Martin Rasmussen and Kalle G. Timperi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.09046},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages, 3 figures; Added acknowledgments