English

Volume of the Minkowski sums of star-shaped sets

Metric Geometry 2021-06-24 v2 Functional Analysis

Abstract

For a compact set ARdA \subset {\mathbb R}^d and an integer k1k\ge 1, let us denote by A[k]={a1++ak:a1,,akA}=i=1kA A[k] = \left\{a_1+\cdots +a_k: a_1, \ldots, a_k\in A\right\}=\sum_{i=1}^k A the Minkowski sum of kk copies of AA. A theorem of Shapley, Folkmann and Starr (1969) states that 1kA[k]\frac{1}{k}A[k] converges to the convex hull of AA in Hausdorff distance as kk tends to infinity. Bobkov, Madiman and Wang (2011) conjectured that the volume of 1kA[k]\frac{1}{k}A[k] is non-decreasing in kk, or in other words, in terms of the volume deficit between the convex hull of AA and 1kA[k]\frac{1}{k}A[k], this convergence is monotone. It was proved by Fradelizi, Madiman, Marsiglietti and Zvavitch (2016) that this conjecture holds true if d=1d=1 but fails for any d12d \geq 12. In this paper we show that the conjecture is true for any star-shaped set ARdA \subset {\mathbb R}^d for d=2d=2 and d=3d=3 and also for arbitrary dimensions d4d \ge 4 under the condition k(d1)(d2)k \ge (d-1)(d-2). In addition, we investigate the conjecture for connected sets and present a counterexample to a generalization of the conjecture to the Minkowski sum of possibly distinct sets in Rd{\mathbb R}^d, for any d7d \geq 7.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.06146,
  title  = {Volume of the Minkowski sums of star-shaped sets},
  author = {Matthieu Fradelizi and Zsolt Lángi and Artem Zvavitch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.06146},
  year   = {2021}
}