University of Calgary

Random mosaics and geometric inequalities

Submitted by ppaterso on Tue, 03/30/2010 - 10:36am.
Apr 2 2010 - 12:00pm
Apr 2 2010 - 1:00pm
Speaker: 

Prof. Daniel Hug, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

Location: 
MS431
Fejes Toth Lecture

A stationary (but not necessarily isotropic) Poisson line field in R² decomposes the plane into convex polygonal cells. The zero cell Z₀ is the cell containing the origin, the typical cell Z is a random polygon which is obtained by picking one of the infinitely many cells at random. It is known that the expected number of vertices, Ef₀(Z), of Z is always 4, whereas for the zero cell we have Ef₀(Z₀)∈[4,π²/2]. The bounds are attained for Poisson line fields having special direction distributions, and they are related to sharp affine invariant geometric inequalities.
  
More generally, in the talk we explain connections between properties of random tessellations and stability results for geometric inequalities in R^{d}. Other examples arise, for instance, in the study of asymptotic shapes of large cells or large k-faces in random tessellations.