Sunday, 24 April 2011

Do plane projections determine a convex polytope?

Suppose a compact convex body $P subset Bbb R^3$ has only polygonal orthogonal projections onto a plane. Does this imply that $P$ is a convex polytope?



This question occurred to me when I was making exercises for my book. I figured this is probably easy and well known, but the literature hasn't been any help. One remark: if the number of sides of all polygons is bounded by $n$, the problem might be easier. Furthermore, if $P$ is assumed to be a convex polytope, this elegant paper by Chazelle-Edelsbrunner-Guibas (1989) gives a (perhaps, unexpectedly large) sharp $exp O(n log n)$ upper bound on the number of vertices of $P$ (ht Csaba Toth who generalized this to higher dimensions).

No comments:

Post a Comment