Related papers: A refinement of the Sylvester problem: Probabiliti…

Consider $d+2$ i.i.d. random points $X_1,\ldots, X_{d+2}$ in $\mathbb R^d$. In this note, we compute the probability that their convex hull is a simplex focusing on three specific distributional settings: (i) the distribution of $X_1$ is…

J. J. Sylvester's four-point problem asks for the probability that four points chosen uniformly at random in the plane have a triangle as their convex hull. Using a combinatorial classification of points in the plane due to Goodman and…

Consider a random walk in $\mathbb{R}^d$ that starts at the origin and whose increment distribution assigns zero probability to any affine hyperplane. We solve Sylvester's problem for these random walks by showing that the probability that…

Pick $n$ independent and uniform random points $U_1,\ldots,U_n$ in a compact convex set $K$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$ with volume 1, and let $P^{(d)}_K(n)$ be the probability that these points are in convex position. The Sylvester conjecture in…

Let $U_1,\ldots,U_n$ be independent random vectors uniformly distributed on the unit sphere $\mathbb S^{d-1}\subseteq\mathbb R^d$, where $n\ge d$, and consider the random polyhedral cone \[ \mathcal W_{n,d}:=\mathop{\mathrm{pos}}…

Let $\mu$ be a probability distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$ which assigns measure zero to every hyperplane and $S$ a set of points sampled independently from $\mu$. What can be said about the expected combinatorial structure of the convex…

For a $d$-dimensional random vector $X$, let $p_{n, X}(\theta)$ be the probability that the convex hull of $n$ independent copies of $X$ contains a given point $\theta$. We provide several sharp inequalities regarding $p_{n, X}(\theta)$ and…

A polytrope is a tropical polytope which at the same time is convex in the ordinary sense. A $d$-dimensional polytrope turns out to be a tropical simplex, that is, it is the tropical convex hull of $d+1$ points. This statement is equivalent…

For a stationary Poisson hyperplane tessellation $X$ in ${\mathbb R}^d$, whose directional distribution satisfies some mild conditions (which hold in the isotropic case, for example), it was recently shown that with probability one every…

Motivated by a problem on the 67th William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, we will summarize three different solutions found on a website. This Putman problem is a special case of Sylvester's four point problem! Suppose four points…

We prove an explicit combinatorial formula for the expected number of faces of the zero polytope of the homogeneous and isotropic Poisson hyperplane tessellation in $\mathbb R^d$. The expected $f$-vector is expressed through the…

The classical theorem of Wendel provides an exact formula for the probability that the convex hull of independent symmetrically distributed vectors in ${\mathbb R}^d$ contains the origin as long as the distributions of the vectors are…

Pick $d+1$ points uniformly at random on the unit sphere in $\mathbb R^d$. What is the expected value of the angle sum of the simplex spanned by these points? Choose $n$ points uniformly at random in the $d$-dimensional ball. What is the…

Consider two half-spaces $H_1^+$ and $H_2^+$ in $\mathbb{R}^{d+1}$ whose bounding hyperplanes $H_1$ and $H_2$ are orthogonal and pass through the origin. The intersection $\mathbb{S}_{2,+}^d:=\mathbb{S}^d\cap H_1^+\cap H_2^+$ is a spherical…

We study random polytopes of the form $[X_1,\ldots,X_n]$ defined as convex hulls of independent and identically distributed random points $X_1,\ldots,X_n$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with one of the following densities: $$ f_{d,\beta} (x) =…

This dissertation investigates the geometric combinatorics of convex polytopes and connections to the behavior of the simplex method for linear programming. We focus our attention on transportation polytopes, which are sets of all tables of…

A two-step model for generating random polytopes is considered. For parameters $d$, $m$, and $p$, the first step is to generate a simple polytope $P$ whose facets are given by $m$ uniform random hyperplanes tangent to the unit sphere in…

Given a set $\Sigma$ of spheres in $\mathbb{E}^d$, with $d\ge{}3$ and $d$ odd, having a fixed number of $m$ distinct radii $\rho_1,\rho_2,...,\rho_m$, we show that the worst-case combinatorial complexity of the convex hull $CH_d(\Sigma)$ of…

Consider the triangle $T$ with vertices $(0,0)$, $(0,1)$, and $(1,0)$. The lower boundary of the convex hull of $(0,1)$, $(1,0)$, together with $n$ independent uniformly distributed random points in $T$, is called a random convex chain and…

This work is to provide a comprehensive treatment of the relationship between the theory of the generalized (palindromic) eigenvalue problem and the theory of the Sylvester-type equations. Under a regularity assumption for a specific matrix…