Radii minimal projections of polytopes and constrained optimization of symmetric polynomials

We provide a characterization of the radii minimal projections of polytopes onto $j$-dimensional subspaces in Euclidean space \E^n. Applied on simplices this characterization allows to reduce the computation of an outer radius to a computation in the circumscribing case or to the computation of an outer radius of a lower-dimensional simplex. In the second part of the paper, we use this characterization to determine the sequence of outer $(n-1)$-radii of regular simplices (which are the radii of smallest enclosing cylinders). This settles a question which arose from the incidence that a paper by Wei{\ss}bach (1983) on this determination was erroneous. In the proof, we first reduce the problem to a constrained optimization problem of symmetric polynomials and then to an optimization problem in a fixed number of variables with additional integer constraints.Comment: Minor revisions. To appear in Advances in Geometr

Sharpening Geometric Inequalities using Computable Symmetry Measures

Many classical geometric inequalities on functionals of convex bodies depend on the dimension of the ambient space. We show that this dimension dependence may often be replaced (totally or partially) by different symmetry measures of the convex body. Since these coefficients are bounded by the dimension but possibly smaller, our inequalities sharpen the original ones. Since they can often be computed efficiently, the improved bounds may also be used to obtain better bounds in approximation algorithms.Comment: This is a preprint. The proper publication in final form is available at journals.cambridge.org, DOI 10.1112/S002557931400029