Best and random approximation of convex bodies by polytopes

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, October 15, 2015 - 11:00am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Werner – Case Western Reserve University – elisabeth.werner@case.eduhttp://www.case.edu/artsci/math/werner/
Organizer
Molei Tao
How well can a convex body be approximated by a polytope? This is a fundamental question in convex geometry, also in view of applications in many other areas of mathematics and related fields. It often involves side conditions like a prescribed number of vertices, or, more generally, k-dimensional faces and a requirement that the body contains the polytope or vice versa. Accuracy of approximation is often measured in the symmetric difference metric, but other metrics can and have been considered. We will present several results about these issues, mostly related to approximation by “random polytopes”.