It is often helpful to compute the intrinsic volumes of a set of which only a pixel image is observed. A computationally efficient approach, which is suggested by several authors and used in practice, is to approximate the intrinsic volumes by linear combinations of the pixel configuration counts. However, we will show that when this approach is used for the computation of an intrinsic volume other than volume or surface area, an asymptotic error of 100% of the correct value cannot be avoided. As a consequence we derive that estimators which ignore the data and return constant values are optimal with respect to a natural criterion which has already been applied successfully for the estimation of the surface area.

A monic polynomial in ${\mathbf{F} }_{q} [t] $ of degree $n$ over a finite field ${\mathbf{F} }_{q} $ of odd characteristic can be written as the sum of two irreducible monic elements in ${\mathbf{F} }_{q} [t] $ of degrees $n$ and $n- 1$ if $q$ is larger than a bound depending only on $n$. The main tool is a sufficient condition for simultaneous primality of two polynomials in one variable $x$ with coefficients in ${\mathbf{F} }_{q} [t] $.

We give a new, geometric proof of the section conjecture for fixed points of finite group actions on projective curves of positive genus defined over the field of complex numbers, as well as its natural nilpotent analogue. As a part of our investigations we give an explicit description of the abelianised section map for groups of prime order in this setting. We also show a version of the $2$-nilpotent section conjecture.

We prove a normalized version of the restricted invertibility principle obtained by Spielman and Srivastava in [An elementary proof of the restricted invertibility theorem. Israel J. Math. 190 (2012), 83–91]. Applying this result, we get a new proof of the proportional Dvoretzky–Rogers factorization theorem recovering the best current estimate in the symmetric setting while we improve the best known result in the non-symmetric case. As a consequence, we slightly improve the estimate for the Banach–Mazur distance to the cube: the distance of every $n$-dimensional normed space from ${ \ell }_{\infty }^{n} $ is at most $\mathop{(2n)}\nolimits ^{5/ 6} $. Finally, using tools from the work of Batson et al in [Twice-Ramanujan sparsifiers. In STOC’09 – Proceedings of the 2009 ACM International Symposium on Theory of Computing, ACM (New York, 2009), 255–262], we give a new proof for a theorem of Kashin and Tzafriri [Some remarks on the restriction of operators to coordinate subspaces. Preprint, 1993] on the norm of restricted matrices.

Let $X$ be an infinite-dimensional uniformly smooth Banach space. We prove that $X$ contains an infinite equilateral set. That is, there exist a constant $\lambda \gt 0$ and an infinite sequence $\mathop{({x}_{i} )}\nolimits_{i= 1}^{\infty } \subset X$ such that $\Vert {x}_{i} - {x}_{j} \Vert = \lambda $ for all $i\not = j$.

In this paper, we prove that if $X$ is an infinite-dimensional real Hilbert space and $J: X\rightarrow \mathbb{R} $ is a sequentially weakly lower semicontinuous ${C}^{1} $ functional whose Gâteaux derivative is non-expansive, then there exists a closed ball $B$ in $X$ such that $(\mathrm{id} + {J}^{\prime } )(B)$ intersects every convex and dense subset of $X$.

We examine the minimal magnitude of perturbations necessary to change the number $N$ of static equilibrium points of a convex solid $K$. We call the normalized volume of the minimally necessary truncation robustness and we seek shapes with maximal robustness for fixed values of $N$. While the upward robustness (referring to the increase of $N$) of smooth, homogeneous convex solids is known to be zero, little is known about their downward robustness. The difficulty of the latter problem is related to the coupling (via integrals) between the geometry of the hull $\mathrm{bd} \hspace{0.167em} K$ and the location of the center of gravity $G$. Here we first investigate two simpler, decoupled problems by examining truncations of $\mathrm{bd} \hspace{0.167em} K$ with $G$ fixed, and displacements of $G$ with $\mathrm{bd} \hspace{0.167em} K$ fixed, leading to the concept of external and internal robustness, respectively. In dimension 2, we find that for any fixed number $N= 2S$, the convex solids with both maximal external and maximal internal robustness are regular $S$-gons. Based on this result we conjecture that regular polygons have maximal downward robustness also in the original, coupled problem. We also show that in the decoupled problems, three-dimensional regular polyhedra have maximal internal robustness, however, only under additional constraints. Finally, we prove results for the full problem in the case of three-dimensional solids. These results appear to explain why monostatic pebbles (with either one stable or one unstable point of equilibrium) are found so rarely in nature.