The Steiner ratio for manifolds. (Q1889544)

The Steiner ratio measures the greatest possible deviation of the length of a minimal spanning tree from the length of the minimal Steiner tree. Using the techniques developed by the first two authors in earlier papers, the present results concern bounds on the Steiner ratio of connected Riemannian manifolds. We exemplify with the paper's first theorem which states that the Steiner ratio of an arbitrary connected \(n\)-dimensional Riemannian manifold is less or equal to that of \(\mathbb R^n\). The latter it was known to be \(\sqrt{3}/2\), the Gilbert-Pollack (1968) conjecture which was proved by Du and Hwang in 1992. As direct applications to the main results, the authors compute the Steiner ratio of flat tori, flat Klein bottles, and projective plane of constant positive curvature, all equal to \(\sqrt{3}/2\). It was shown however that the Steiner ratio of an arbitrary two-dimensional surface of constant curvature \(-1\) is strictly less than \(\sqrt{3}/2\).