Circumscribed simplices of minimal mean width (Q880237)

Let \(K\) be a convex body in the \(n\)-dimensional euclidean space; let \(M(K)\) denote its mean width, and let \(T_K\) be the simplex of minimal mean width circumscibed about \(K\). The authors prove that \[ M(T_K)\leq \frac 12M(K)M(T^n), \] whrere \(T^n\) is the regular simplex circumscribed about the unit ball \(B^n\); the equality holds if and only if \(K\) is a ball. They also prove that every simplex of minimal mean width circumscribed about a given ball is regular. The `dual' analogue of this last result is (for \(n\geq 3\)) a long-standing open problem: among all simplices contained in a given ball, do the regular ones have maximal mean width? As the authors point out, in the planar case, there is an extension from circumscribed triangles to circumscribed polygons. In higher dimensions, the averaging argument used in the proof works only for exceptional polytopes. In the last part of the paper the limits of this argument are discussed and there is an analogous result for circumscribed parallelepipeds, with balls replaced by bodies of constant width.