Numerical solution of the Minkowski problem (Q5953928)

The problem alluded to in the title asks to determine a convex surface knowing its curvature. The author's approach is based on discretization: the support function of the target set is approximated by truncated spherical harmonic series. The original problem can be solved by means of one of several methods of constrained optimization in a finite dimensional real space. Details are given for numerical procedures based on Newton's method and the gradient method. Despite the fact that the convergence of the proposed method is not proved yet, numerical tests suggest it is robust and fast. An interesting feature worth mentioning is the fact that the method works in practice for optimization of other objective functions.