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Tight bounds on the maximal perimeter and the maximal width of convex small polygons

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Abstract

A small polygon is a polygon of unit diameter. The maximal perimeter and the maximal width of a convex small polygon with \(n=2^s\) vertices are not known when \(s \ge 4\). In this paper, we construct a family of convex small n-gons, \(n=2^s\) and \(s\ge 3\), and show that the perimeters and the widths obtained cannot be improved for large n by more than \(a/n^6\) and \(b/n^4\) respectively, for certain positive constants a and b. In addition, assuming that a conjecture of Mossinghoff is true, we formulate the maximal perimeter problem as a nonlinear optimization problem involving trigonometric functions and, for \(n=2^s\) with \(3 \le s\le 7\), we provide global optimal solutions.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Charles Audet, Professor at Polytechnique Montreal, for helpful discussions on extremal small polygons and helpful comments on early drafts of this paper.

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Correspondence to Christian Bingane.

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Bingane, C. Tight bounds on the maximal perimeter and the maximal width of convex small polygons. J Glob Optim 84, 1033–1051 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10898-022-01181-9

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