Matthew Alexander

The goal of this paper is to study geometric and extremal properties of the convex body $B_{\mathcal F(M)}$, which is the unit ball of the Lipschitz-free Banach space associated with a finite metric space $M$. We investigate $\ell_1$ and $\ell_\infty$-sums, in particular we characterize the metric spaces such that $B_{\mathcal F(M)}$ is a Hanner polytope. We also characterize the finite metric spaces whose Lipschitz-free spaces are isometric. We discuss the extreme properties of the volume product $\mathcal{P}(M)=|B_{\mathcal F(M)}|\cdot|B_{\mathcal F(M)}^\circ|$, when the number of elements of $M$ is fixed. We show that if $\mathcal P(M)$ is maximal among all the metric spaces with the same number of points, then all triangle inequalities in $M$ are strict and $B_{\mathcal F(M)}$ is simplicial. We also focus on the metric spaces minimizing $\mathcal P(M)$, and in the Mahler's conjecture for this class of convex bodies.

For a convex body $K \subset {\mathbb R}^n$, let $K^z = \{y\in{\mathbb R}^n : \langle y-z, x-z\rangle\le 1, \mbox{\ for all\ } x\in K\}$ be the polar body of $K$ with respect to the center of polarity $z \in {\mathbb R}^n$. The goal of this paper is to study the maximum of the volume product $\mathcal{P}(K)=\min_{z\in {\rm int}(K)}|K||K^z|$, among convex polytopes $K\subset {\mathbb R}^n$ with a number of vertices bounded by some fixed integer $m \ge n+1$. In particular, we prove that the supremum is reached at a simplicial polytope with exactly $m$ vertices and we provide a new proof of a result of Meyer and Reisner showing that, in the plane, the regular polygon has maximal volume product among all polygons with at most $m$ vertices. Finally, we treat the case of polytopes with $n+2$ vertices in ${\mathbb R}^n$.

Let $\# K$ be a number of integer lattice points contained in a set $K$. In this paper we prove that for each $d\in {\mathbb N}$ there exists a constant $C(d)$ depending on $d$ only, such that for any origin-symmetric convex body $K \subset {\mathbb R}^d$ containing $d$ linearly independent lattice points $$ \# K \leq C(d)\max(\# (K\cap H))\, {\rm vol}_d(K)^{\frac{d-m}{d}}, $$ where the maximum is taken over all $m$-dimensional subspaces of ${\mathbb R}^d$. We also prove that $C(d)$ can be chosen asymptotically of order $O(1)^{d}d^{d-m}$. In addition, we show that if $K$ is an unconditional convex body then $C(d)$ can be chosen asymptotically of order $O(d)^{d-m}$.