John's decomposition in the general case and applications (Q2494198)

The ellipsoid of maximal volume inside a convex body (the John ellipsoid), together with the ellipsoid of minimal volume containing a convex body (the Loewer ellipsoid) play a central role in the study of distances between convex bodies. F. John showed (1948) that when the John ellipsoid is the unit Euclidean ball then the identity may be written as a positive combination of some rank one projections. In this paper, a decomposition of the same type is studied in a more general environment. \(A\) is a subset of finite dimensional affine space, \(B\) is a subset of affine forms on \(E\) and the maximization of the volume \(T(\text{conv}(A))\) among a particular class of affine transformations is discussed. A description of an operator \(T\) involving contact points of two general convex bodies \(K\) and \(L\) is given, when \(T(K)\) is in a position of maximal volume in \(L\). A general John theorem for arbitrary convex bodies is derived using methods of optimization. Many applications of these results are included: a positive answer to a problem of Grünbaum (1963), results on Banach-Mazur distance between an arbitrary convex body and an arbitrary centrally-symmetric body and other applications to volume ratio estimates.