Jung's theorem

Last updated

In geometry, Jung's theorem is an inequality between the diameter of a set of points in any Euclidean space and the radius of the minimum enclosing ball of that set. It is named after Heinrich Jung, who first studied this inequality in 1901. Algorithms also exist to solve the smallest-circle problem explicitly.

Contents

Statement

Consider a compact set

and let

be the diameter of K, that is, the largest Euclidean distance between any two of its points. Jung's theorem states that there exists a closed ball with radius

that contains K. The boundary case of equality is attained by the regular n-simplex.

Jung's theorem in the plane

The most common case of Jung's theorem is in the plane, that is, when n = 2. In this case the theorem states that there exists a circle enclosing all points whose radius satisfies

and this bound is as tight as possible since when K is an equilateral triangle (or its three vertices) one has

General metric spaces

For any bounded set in any metric space, . The first inequality is implied by the triangle inequality for the center of the ball and the two diametral points, and the second inequality follows since a ball of radius centered at any point of will contain all of . Both these inequalities are tight:

Versions of Jung's theorem for various non-Euclidean geometries are also known (see e.g. Dekster 1995, 1997).

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quadrilateral</span> Polygon with four sides and four corners

In geometry a quadrilateral is a four-sided polygon, having four edges (sides) and four corners (vertices). The word is derived from the Latin words quadri, a variant of four, and latus, meaning "side". It is also called a tetragon, derived from greek "tetra" meaning "four" and "gon" meaning "corner" or "angle", in analogy to other polygons. Since "gon" means "angle", it is analogously called a quadrangle, or 4-angle. A quadrilateral with vertices , , and is sometimes denoted as .

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Great circle</span> Spherical geometry analog of a straight line

In mathematics, a great circle or orthodrome is the circular intersection of a sphere and a plane passing through the sphere's center point.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Triangle inequality</span> Property of geometry, also used to generalize the notion of "distance" in metric spaces

In mathematics, the triangle inequality states that for any triangle, the sum of the lengths of any two sides must be greater than or equal to the length of the remaining side. This statement permits the inclusion of degenerate triangles, but some authors, especially those writing about elementary geometry, will exclude this possibility, thus leaving out the possibility of equality. If x, y, and z are the lengths of the sides of the triangle, with no side being greater than z, then the triangle inequality states that

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ball (mathematics)</span> Volume space bounded by a sphere

In mathematics, a ball is the solid figure bounded by a sphere; it is also called a solid sphere. It may be a closed ball or an open ball.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Equilateral triangle</span> Shape with three equal sides

In geometry, an equilateral triangle is a triangle in which all three sides have the same length. In the familiar Euclidean geometry, an equilateral triangle is also equiangular; that is, all three internal angles are also congruent to each other and are each 60°. It is also a regular polygon, so it is also referred to as a regular triangle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cyclic quadrilateral</span> Quadrilateral whose vertices can all fall on a single circle

In Euclidean geometry, a cyclic quadrilateral or inscribed quadrilateral is a quadrilateral whose vertices all lie on a single circle. This circle is called the circumcircle or circumscribed circle, and the vertices are said to be concyclic. The center of the circle and its radius are called the circumcenter and the circumradius respectively. Other names for these quadrilaterals are concyclic quadrilateral and chordal quadrilateral, the latter since the sides of the quadrilateral are chords of the circumcircle. Usually the quadrilateral is assumed to be convex, but there are also crossed cyclic quadrilaterals. The formulas and properties given below are valid in the convex case.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elliptic geometry</span> Non-Euclidean geometry

Elliptic geometry is an example of a geometry in which Euclid's parallel postulate does not hold. Instead, as in spherical geometry, there are no parallel lines since any two lines must intersect. However, unlike in spherical geometry, two lines are usually assumed to intersect at a single point. Because of this, the elliptic geometry described in this article is sometimes referred to as single elliptic geometry whereas spherical geometry is sometimes referred to as double elliptic geometry.

In mathematics, the isoperimetric inequality is a geometric inequality involving the perimeter of a set and its volume. In -dimensional space the inequality lower bounds the surface area or perimeter of a set by its volume ,

A taxicab geometry or a Manhattan geometry is a geometry whose usual distance function or metric of Euclidean geometry is replaced by a new metric in which the distance between two points is the sum of the absolute differences of their Cartesian coordinates. The taxicab metric is also known as rectilinear distance, L1 distance, L1 distance or norm, snake distance, city block distance, Manhattan distance or Manhattan length. The latter names refer to the rectilinear street layout on the island of Manhattan, where the shortest path a taxi travels between two points is the sum of the absolute values of distances that it travels on avenues and on streets.

This is a glossary of some terms used in Riemannian geometry and metric geometry — it doesn't cover the terminology of differential topology.

In mathematics, the Bishop–Gromov inequality is a comparison theorem in Riemannian geometry, named after Richard L. Bishop and Mikhail Gromov. It is closely related to Myers' theorem, and is the key point in the proof of Gromov's compactness theorem.

In mathematics, a norm is a function from a real or complex vector space to the non-negative real numbers that behaves in certain ways like the distance from the origin: it commutes with scaling, obeys a form of the triangle inequality, and is zero only at the origin. In particular, the Euclidean distance in a Euclidean space is defined by a norm on the associated Euclidean vector space, called the Euclidean norm, the 2-norm, or, sometimes, the magnitude of the vector. This norm can be defined as the square root of the inner product of a vector with itself.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Real coordinate space</span> Space formed by the n-tuples of real numbers

In mathematics, the real coordinate space of dimension n, denoted Rn or , is the set of the n-tuples of real numbers, that is the set of all sequences of n real numbers. Special cases are called the real lineR1 and the real coordinate planeR2. With component-wise addition and scalar multiplication, it is a real vector space, and its elements are called coordinate vectors.

In mathematics, Dvoretzky's theorem is an important structural theorem about normed vector spaces proved by Aryeh Dvoretzky in the early 1960s, answering a question of Alexander Grothendieck. In essence, it says that every sufficiently high-dimensional normed vector space will have low-dimensional subspaces that are approximately Euclidean. Equivalently, every high-dimensional bounded symmetric convex set has low-dimensional sections that are approximately ellipsoids.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pu's inequality</span>

In differential geometry, Pu's inequality, proved by Pao Ming Pu, relates the area of an arbitrary Riemannian surface homeomorphic to the real projective plane with the lengths of the closed curves contained in it.

In mathematics, a space, where is a real number, is a specific type of metric space. Intuitively, triangles in a space are "slimmer" than corresponding "model triangles" in a standard space of constant curvature . In a space, the curvature is bounded from above by . A notable special case is ; complete spaces are known as "Hadamard spaces" after the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bicentric quadrilateral</span> Convex, 4-sided shape with an incircle and a circumcircle

In Euclidean geometry, a bicentric quadrilateral is a convex quadrilateral that has both an incircle and a circumcircle. The radii and centers of these circles are called inradius and circumradius, and incenter and circumcenter respectively. From the definition it follows that bicentric quadrilaterals have all the properties of both tangential quadrilaterals and cyclic quadrilaterals. Other names for these quadrilaterals are chord-tangent quadrilateral and inscribed and circumscribed quadrilateral. It has also rarely been called a double circle quadrilateral and double scribed quadrilateral.

In mathematics, the conformal radius is a way to measure the size of a simply connected planar domain D viewed from a point z in it. As opposed to notions using Euclidean distance, this notion is well-suited to use in complex analysis, in particular in conformal maps and conformal geometry.

In mathematics, a unit sphere is simply a sphere of radius one around a given center. More generally, it is the set of points of distance 1 from a fixed central point, where different norms can be used as general notions of "distance". A unit ball is the closed set of points of distance less than or equal to 1 from a fixed central point. Usually the center is at the origin of the space, so one speaks of "the unit ball" or "the unit sphere". Special cases are the unit circle and the unit disk.

In mathematics, the dyadic cubes are a collection of cubes in Rn of different sizes or scales such that the set of cubes of each scale partition Rn and each cube in one scale may be written as a union of cubes of a smaller scale. These are frequently used in mathematics as a way of discretizing objects in order to make computations or analysis easier. For example, to study an arbitrary subset of A of Euclidean space, one may instead replace it by a union of dyadic cubes of a particular size that cover the set. One can consider this set as a pixelized version of the original set, and as smaller cubes are used one gets a clearer image of the set A. Most notable appearances of dyadic cubes include the Whitney extension theorem and the Calderón–Zygmund lemma.

References