7 research outputs found
New bounds on the average distance from the Fermat-Weber center of a planar convex body
The Fermat-Weber center of a planar body is a point in the plane from
which the average distance to the points in is minimal. We first show that
for any convex body in the plane, the average distance from the
Fermat-Weber center of to the points of is larger than , where is the diameter of . This proves a conjecture
of Carmi, Har-Peled and Katz. From the other direction, we prove that the same
average distance is at most . The new bound substantially improves the previous bound of
due to
Abu-Affash and Katz, and brings us closer to the conjectured value of . We also confirm the upper bound conjecture for centrally
symmetric planar convex bodies.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures. An earlier version (now obsolete): A. Dumitrescu
and Cs. D. T\'oth: New bounds on the average distance from the Fermat-Weber
center of a planar convex body, in Proceedings of the 20th International
Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2009), 2009, LNCS 5878,
Springer, pp. 132-14
On the Fermat-Weber Point of a Polygonal Chain and Its Generalizations
In this paper, we study the properties of the Fermat-Weber point for a set of fixed points, whose arrangement coincides with the vertices of a regular polygonal chain. A k-chain of a regular n-gon is the segment of the boundary of the regular n-gon formed by a set of k (≤ n) consecutive vertices of the regular n-gon. We show that for every odd positive integer k, there exists an integer N(k), such that the Fermat-Weber point of a set of k fixed points lying on the vertices a k-chain of a n-gon coincides with a vertex of the chain whenever n ≥ N(k). We also show that ⌈πm(m + 1) - π2/4⌉ ≤ N(k) ≤ ⌊πm(m + 1) + 1⌋, where k (= 2m + 1) is any odd positive integer. We then extend this result to a more general family of point set, and give an O(hk log k) time algorithm for determining whether a given set of k points, having h points on the convex hull, belongs to such a family
On stars and Steiner stars. II
A Steiner star for a set P of n points in Rd connects an arbitrary center point to all points of P, while a star connects a point p ∈ P to the remaining n − 1 points of P. All connections are realized by straight line segments. Fekete and Meijer showed that the minimum star is at most √ 2 times longer than the minimum Steiner star for any finite point configuration in Rd. The maximum ratio between them, over all finite point configurations in Rd, is called the star Steiner ratio in Rd. It is conjectured that this ratio is 4/π = 1.2732... in the plane and 4/3 = 1.3333... in three dimensions. Here we give upper bounds of 1.3631 in the plane, and 1.3833 in 3-space, thereby substantially improving recent upper bounds of 1.3999, and √ 2 − 10−4, respectively. Our results also imply improved bounds on the maximum ratios between the minimum star and the maximum matching in two and three dimensions. Our method exploits the connection with the classical problem of estimating the maximum sum of pairwise distances among n points on the unit sphere, first studied by László Fejes Tóth. It is quite general and yields the first nontrivial estimates below √ 2 on the star Steiner ratios in arbitrary dimensions. We show, however, that the star Steiner ratio in Rd tends to √ 2, the upper bound given by Fekete and Meijer, as d goes to infinity. Our estimates on the star Steiner ratios are therefore much closer to the conjectured values in higher dimensions! As it turns out, our estimates as well as the conjectured values of the Steiner ratios (in the limit, for n going to infinity) are related to the classical infinite Wallis product: