Illumination and exposition of a convex \(n\)-dimensional body depending on its sharpness (Q698897)

The author investigates a variant of the famous covering or, equivalently, illumination problem due to Levi, Gohberg, Markus, and Hadwiger (namely to cover a convex body in Euclidean \(d\)-space by the least possible number of smaller homothetical copies). A convex body \(K\subset E^d\) is said to be exposable to a family \(D\) of given directions if there is a linear transformation \(L:E^d\to E^d\) such that \(L(K)\) (and each convex body isometric to \(L(K))\) is illuminated by \(D\). Denoting by \(c_d\) the minimum integer such that any convex body in \(E^d\) is exposable to a (fixed) set \(D\) of this cardinality, the author establishes an upper bound on \(c_d\). This upper bound is given in terms of the minimum number of open spherical caps of diameter \(\varphi\) sufficient to cover the whole unit sphere of \(E^d\), where \(\varphi\) depends on an affine invariant of \(K\) called the sharpness of this convex body.