In this talk I will describe those linear subspaces of $\mathbf{R}^d$ which can be formed by taking the linear span of lattice points in a half-open parallelepiped. I will draw some connections between this problem and Keith Ball's cube slicing theorem, which states that the volume of any slice of the unit cube $[0,1]^d$ by a codimension-$k$ subspace is at most $2^{k/2}$.
Alesker has introduced the notion of a smooth valuation on a smooth manifold M. This is a special kind of set function, defined on sufficiently regular compact subsets A of M, extending the corresponding idea from classical convexity theory. Formally, a smooth valuation is a kind of curvature integral; informally, it is a sum of Euler characteristics of intersections of A with a collection of objects B. Smooth valuations admit a natural multiplication, again due to Alesker.
We already know that the Euclidean unit ball is at the center of the Banach-Mazur compactum, however its structure is still being explored to this day. In 1987, Szarek and Talagrand proved that the maximum distance $R_{\infty} ^n$ between an arbitrary $n$-dimensional normed space and $\ell _{\infty} ^n$, or equivalently the maximum distance between a symmetric convex body in $\mathbb{R} ^n$ and the $n$-dimensional unit cube is bounded above by $c n^{7/8}$. In this talk, we will discuss a related paper by A.
