Generatrissa: the problems of Maxwell and Voronoi (Q1385974)

The authors state several results concerning the existence of a generatrissa of a partition of Euclidean \(n\)-dimensional space, sketching the idea of its construction. A generatrissa of an \(n\)-dimensional closed strongly connected subcomplex \(U\) of a partition \(T\) is a continuous, locally convex function \(f\) defined on \(U\) such that for each polyhedron \(P\) in \(U\) there exists a linear function that represents \(f\) on \(P\). Some of these results establish relations between the existence of a generatrissa for \(T\) and the existence of a dual graph of the partition \(T\), that is, a graph such that there exists a one-to-one correspondence between its vertices and the polyhedra of \(T\), inducing a one-to-one correspondence between the graph's edges and the \((n-1)\)-dimensional faces in \(T\), such that each \((n-2)\)-dimensional face in \(T\) is associated with a cycle in the graph that is the boundary of a convex polygon. This paper generalizes work by J. C. Maxwell and G. F. Voronoi, respectively in dimension 2 and 3. The authors point out the relation of the work in this paper with the complexity of convex hull algorithms.