The Beauty of Random Polytopes Inscribed in the 2-sphere

Consider a random set of points on the unit sphere in $\mathbb{R}^d$, which can be either uniformly sampled or a Poisson point process. Its convex hull is a random inscribed polytope, whose boundary approximates the sphere. We focus on the case $d=3$, for which there are elementary proofs and fascinating formulas for metric properties. In particular, we study the fraction of acute facets, the expected intrinsic volumes, the total edge length, and the distance to a fixed point. Finally we generalize the results to the ellipsoid with homeoid density.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure

Intrinsic volumes of inscribed random polytopes in smooth convex bodies

Let $K$ be a $d$ dimensional convex body with a twice continuously differentiable boundary and everywhere positive Gauss-Kronecker curvature. Denote by $K_n$ the convex hull of $n$ points chosen randomly and independently from $K$ according to the uniform distribution. Matching lower and upper bounds are obtained for the orders of magnitude of the variances of the $s$-th intrinsic volumes $V_s(K_n)$ of $K_n$ for $s\in\{1, ..., d\}$. Furthermore, strong laws of large numbers are proved for the intrinsic volumes of $K_n$. The essential tools are the Economic Cap Covering Theorem of B\'ar\'any and Larman, and the Efron-Stein jackknife inequality

Software for Exact Integration of Polynomials over Polyhedra

We are interested in the fast computation of the exact value of integrals of polynomial functions over convex polyhedra. We present speed ups and extensions of the algorithms presented in previous work. We present the new software implementation and provide benchmark computations. The computation of integrals of polynomials over polyhedral regions has many applications; here we demonstrate our algorithmic tools solving a challenge from combinatorial voting theory.Comment: Major updat

Polytopes from Subgraph Statistics

Polytopes from subgraph statistics are important in applications and conjectures and theorems in extremal graph theory can be stated as properties of them. We have studied them with a view towards applications by inscribing large explicit polytopes and semi-algebraic sets when the facet descriptions are intractable. The semi-algebraic sets called curvy zonotopes are introduced and studied using graph limits. From both volume calculations and algebraic descriptions we find several interesting conjectures.Comment: Full article, 21 pages, 8 figures. Minor expository update