Book Description

This textbook treats two important and related matters in convex geometry: the quantification of symmetry of a convex set--measures of symmetry--and the degree to which convex sets that nearly minimize such measures of symmetry are themselves nearly symmetric--the phenomenon of stability. By gathering the subject's core ideas and highlights around Grünbaum's general notion of measure of symmetry, it paints a coherent picture of the subject, and guides the reader from the basics to the state-of-the-art. The exposition takes various paths to results in order to develop the reader's grasp of the unity of ideas, while interspersed remarks enrich the material with a behind-the-scenes view of corollaries and logical connections, alternative proofs, and allied results from the literature. Numerous illustrations elucidate definitions and key constructions, and over 70 exercises--with hints and references for the more difficult ones--test and sharpen the reader's comprehension. The presentation includes: a basic course covering foundational notions in convex geometry, the three pillars of the combinatorial theory (the theorems of Carathéodory, Radon, and Helly), critical sets and Minkowski measure, the Minkowski-Radon inequality, and, to illustrate the general theory, a study of convex bodies of constant width; two proofs of F. John's ellipsoid theorem; a treatment of the stability of Minkowski measure, the Banach-Mazur metric, and Groemer's stability estimate for the Brunn-Minkowski inequality; important specializations of Grünbaum's abstract measure of symmetry, such as Winternitz measure, the Rogers-Shepard volume ratio, and Guo's Lp -Minkowski measure; a construction by the author of a new sequence of measures of symmetry, the kth mean Minkowski measure; and lastly, an intriguing application to the moduli space of certain distinguished maps from a Riemannian homogeneous space to spheres--illustrating the broad mathematical relevance of the book's subject.