Reduced bodies in normed planes (Q2480584)

The thickness of a body is the width of the smallest slab that can contain it. A convex body is said to be ``reduced'' if any convex body properly contained in it has smaller width. Thus, for instance, in the Euclidean plane, a regular \(n\)-gon is reduced if and only if \(n\) is odd. The idea was introduced by \textit{E. Heil} [Kleinste konvexe Körper gegebener Dicke, Preprint 453, Fachbereich Mathematik der TH Darmstadt] and \textit{B. V. Dekster} showed in [J. Geom. 26, 77--81 (1986; Zbl 0586.52002)] that a reduced strictly convex body in the Euclidean plane must be of constant width. In 1990, the second author proved a sort of converse to Dekster's result [\textit{M. Lassak}, Isr. J. Math. 70, 365--379 (1990; Zbl 0707.52005)], by showing that if a planar reduced body is of minimum width in two directions but not in the directions between them, its boundary must contain certain nondegenerate line segments. In the present paper, the latter result is generalized to arbitrary normed planes (two-dimensional Banach spaces). This apparently rather technical theorem yields a number of interesting corollaries, including ``normed'' versions of Dekster's result, and of several results from the second author's 1990 paper.