A solution to the fifth and the eighth Busemann-Petty problems in a small neighborhood of the Euclidean ball (Q822711)

In 1956, Busemann and Petty posed a famous set of ten problems about plane sections through convex bodies. The first problem was solved in the late 1990s through work by many mathematicians. The other problems have proved more refractory. It may be shown that for any ellipsoid in \(\mathbb{R}^n\): \begin{itemize} \item[(i)] the product of the support function in direction \(\vec{\theta}\) and the central cross-section perpendicular to \(\vec{\theta}\) is a constant; \item[(ii)] the product of the Gaussian curvature at the point with normal vector \(\vec{\theta}\) and the \(n+1^{st}\) power of the central cross-section perpendicular to \(\vec{\theta}\) is a constant. \end{itemize} The fifth Busemann-Petty problem is to show that, for \(n\geq 3\), (i) characterizes the ellipsoid among centrally-symmetric convex bodies (it does not do so in the plane!); and the eighth problem is (approximately) to show that (ii) does so for \(n\geq 2\). The authors prove both of these for convex bodies sufficiently close to the Euclidean ball in the Banach-Mazur metric.