Affinely regular polygons as extremals of area functionals (Q2482187)

For a convex polygon \(P\) with (counterclockwise ordered) vertices \(z_1,\dots,z_n\) the authors consider the functionals \[ F(P)=\min_{j=1,\dots,n}\frac{\bigl| W_j(P)\bigr| }{| P| },\qquad G(P)=\min_{j=1,\dots,n}\frac{\bigl| T_j(P)\bigr| }{| P| }, \] which are affinely invariant; here \(| \cdot| \) denotes the area, \(W_j(P)\) is defined to be the triangle \(z_{j-1}z_jz_{j+1}\) and \(T_j(P)\) is the triangle outside \(P\) bounded by the edge \(z_jz_{j+1}\) and the continuations of the two adjacent sides. The main result in this paper proves that the maximizers of the above functionals are affine images of regular \(n\)-gons. The above functionals \(F\) and \(G\) are also related to several different problems. On the one hand the authors study the existing connection between \(G\) and the stability of the reconstruction in Hammer's X-ray problem for planar sets. On the other hand, they discuss some extensions of both functionals \(F\) and \(G\) to the class of planar convex bodies and present connections to the affine isoperimetric inequality. The same review has been published in Zbl 1177.52005 for the reprint version [Twentieth anniversary volume: Discrete and computational geometry. New York, NY: Springer, 254--278 (2009)].