On some ellipsoid formulas of Busemann, Furstenberg and Tzkoni, Guggenheimer, and Petty (Q810875)

For centered ellipsoids E, F in \({\mathbb{R}}^ n\), the author proves the formula \[ (\omega_ n^{n-2}/\omega^ n_{n-1})\int_{S^{n- 1}}v(E\cap \xi_ u)^{n+1}v(F\cap \xi_ u)^{-1}du=(V(E)^{n- 1}/V(F))\int_{\partial F}h_ F(u)du. \] Here V denotes the volume, v is (n-1)-dimensional volume, \(\xi_ u\) is the hyperplane through 0 orthogonal to \(u\in S^{n-1}\), where \(S^{n-1}\) is the unit sphere, du is the area element corresponding to the outer unit normal vector u, \(h_ F\) denotes the support function of F, and \(\omega_ n\) is the volume of the n-dimensional unit ball. A similar result is proved for projections instead of intersections with hyperplanes. The results unify and extend several earlier ellipsoid formulae scattered in the literature. The proofs make use of several constructions and notions from the affine geometry of convex bodies, like polar bodies, projection bodies, intersection bodies, mixed and dual mixed volumes.