English

Sylvester's problem for random walks and bridges

Probability 2024-09-13 v1 Metric Geometry

Abstract

Consider a random walk in Rd\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 the first d+2d+2 steps of the walk are in convex position is equal to 12(d+1)!1-\frac{2}{(d+1)!}. The analogous result also holds for random bridges of length d+2d+2, so long as the joint increment distribution is exchangeable.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.07927,
  title  = {Sylvester's problem for random walks and bridges},
  author = {Hugo Panzo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.07927},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

7 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:42:19.798Z