On Fejes Tóth's conjectured maximizer for the sum of angles between lines

DOI10.1007/S00245-020-09745-5MaRDI QIDQ2234322zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Tongseok Lim, Robert J. McCann

Publication date 19 October 2021

Published in Applied Mathematics and Optimization (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.08698

zbMATH Keywords

attractive-repulsive potentialsextremal problems of distance geometrygreat circle distancemild repulsion limitpotential energy minimizationprojective spaceRiesz energyspherical designs

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Inequalities and extremum problems involving convexity in convex geometry (52A40) Integration on manifolds; measures on manifolds (58C35) Variational methods for problems in mechanics (70G75) Quadratic programming (90C20) Nonconvex programming, global optimization (90C26)

Abstract: Choose $N$ unoriented lines through the origin of $$. The sum of the angles between these lines is conjectured to be maximized if the lines are distributed as evenly as possible amongst the coordinate axes of some orthonormal basis for $$. For $dge2$ we embed the conjecture into a one-parameter family of problems, in which we seek to maximize the sum of the $alpha$-th power of the renormalized angles between the lines. We show the conjecture is equivalent to this same configuration becoming the {em unique} optimizer (up to rotations) for all $alpha>1$. We establish both the asserted optimality and uniqueness in the limiting case $alpha=infty$ of mildest repulsion. The same conclusions extend to $N=infty$, provided we assume only finitely many of the lines are distinct.

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Cites work

• Distributions of positive mass, which maximize a certain generalized energy integral
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• Extremal Problems of Distance Geometry Related to Energy Integrals
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• On the angle sum of lines
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Cited in

(4)

• Maximizing expected powers of the angle between pairs of points in projective space
• On the Fejes Tóth problem about the sum of angles between lines
• On the Cardinality of Sets in R^d Obeying a Slightly Obtuse Angle Bound
• Refinement of the mean angle estimation in the Feyesh Toth problem

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