New affine measures of symmetry for convex bodies (Q645228)

The authors define an affine measure of symmetry for convex bodies \(K\) based on a pair \((p(K),q(K))\) of affine covariant points in \(K\). This measure is essentially the appropriately normalized Euclidean distance of \(p(K)\) and \(q(K)\). The idea behind this definition is that for a body with `enough symmetries' (i.e.~whose group of symmetries has exactly one fixed point), this distance will be zero. For other convex bodies it will give a certain measure of deviation from symmetry. The main result states that when \(p\) is the centroid and \(q\) is the Santaló point, there are examples of convex bodies for which the above normalized distance is positive uniformly in the dimension. The proof uses probabilistic arguments. A similar result is obtained with less effort in the case where \(p\) and \(q\) are the centers of the John and the Löwner ellipsoids, respectively.