The strange geometric behavior of a ball and a cube in high dimensions.


Maria Alfonseca
Department of Mathematics
5pm, October 31, 2008
Minard 334

Abstract: Suppose we have a ball and a cube, we intersect each of them with hyperplanes passing through their centers, measure the areas of the intersections and observe that every section of the cube has smaller area than the corresponding parallel section of the sphere. Is it possible that the cube has bigger volume than the sphere? Surprisingly, the answer can be affirmative! We will see in which cases our intuition can be wrong.