It seems that I have unwittingly started an “open problem of the week” column here; certainly it seems easier for me to pose unsolved problems than to write papers :-) .
This question in convex geometry has been around for a while; I am fond of it because it attempts to capture the intuitively obvious fact that cubes and octahedra are the “pointiest” possible symmetric convex bodies one can create. Sadly, we still have very few tools to make this intuition rigorous (especially when compared against the assertion that the Euclidean ball is the “roundest” possible convex body, for which we have many rigorous and useful formulations).
To state the conjecture I need a little notation. Suppose we have a symmetric convex body in a Euclidean space, thus B is open, convex, bounded, and symmetric around the origin. We can define the polar body
by
.
This is another symmetric convex body. One can interpret B as the unit ball of a Banach space norm on , in which case
is simply the unit ball of the dual norm. The Mahler volume
of the body is defined as the product of the volumes of B and its polar body:
One feature of this Mahler volume is that it is an affine invariant: if is any invertible linear transformation, then TB has the same Mahler volume as B. It is also clear that a body has the same Mahler volume as its polar body. Finally the Mahler volume reacts well to Cartesian products: if
are convex bodies, one can check that
.
For the unit Euclidean ball one can easily compute the Mahler volume as
while for the unit cube or the unit octahedron
the Mahler volume is
.
One can also think of as the unit balls of the
norms respectively.
The Mahler conjecture asserts that these are the two extreme possibilities for the Mahler volume, thus for all convex bodies we should have
Intuitively, this means that the Mahler volume is capturing the “roundness” of a convex body, with balls (and affine images of balls, i.e. ellipsoids) being the roundest, and cubes and octahedra (and affine images thereof) being the pointiest.
The upper bound was established by Santaló (with the three-dimensional case settled much earlier by Blaschke), using the powerful tool of Steiner symmetrisation, which basically is a mechanism for making a convex body rounder and rounder, converging towards a ball. One can quickly verifies that each application of Steiner symmetrisation does not decrease the Mahler volume, and the result easily follows. As a corollary one can show that the ellipsoids are the only bodies which actually attain the maximal Mahler volume. (Several other proofs of this result, now known as the Blaschke-Santaló inequality, exist in the literature. It plays an important role in affine geometry, being a model example of an affine isoperimetric inequality.) Somewhat amusingly, one can use Plancherel’s theorem to quickly obtain a crude version of this inequality, losing a factor of ; more generally, though, I doubt that these sorts of “sharp constant” problems (for which one cannot afford to lose unspecified absolute constants) are amenable to a Fourier-analytic approach.
The lower inequality remains open. In my opinion, the main reason why this conjecture is so difficult is that unlike the upper bound, in which there is essentially only one extremiser up to affine transformations (namely the ball), there are many distinct extremisers for the lower bound – not only the cube and the octahedron, but also products of cubes and octahedra, polar bodies of products of cubes and octahedra, products of polar bodies of… well, you get the idea. It is really difficult to conceive of any sort of flow or optimisation procedure which would converge to exactly these bodies and no others; a radically different type of argument might be needed.
If one is willing to lose some factors in the inequality, then some partial results are known. Firstly, from John’s theorem one trivially gets a bound of the form . A significantly deeper argument of Bourgain and Milman, using the theory of cotype (which roughly speaking controls the size of long random sums in a normed vector space), gives a bound of the form
for some absolute constant C; this bound is now known as the reverse Santaló inequality. A slightly weaker “low-tech” bound of
was given by Kuperberg, using only elementary methods. The best result currently known is again by Kuperberg, who showed that
using some Gauss-type linking integrals associated to a Minkowski metric in .
In another direction, the Mahler conjecture has also been verified for some special classes of convex bodies, such as zonoids (limits of finite Minkowski sums of line segments) and 1-unconditional convex bodies (those which are symmetric around all coordinate hyperplanes).
There seem to be some other directions to pursue. For instance, it might be possible to show that (say) the unit cube is a local minimiser of Mahler volume, or at least that the Mahler volume is stationary with respect to small perturbations of the cube (whatever that means). Another possibility is to locate some reasonable measure of “pointiness” for convex bodies, which is extremised precisely at cubes, octahedra, and products or polar products thereof. Then the task would be reduced to controlling the Mahler volume by this measure of pointiness.
Some time ago I wrote some notes on the more elementary aspects of the above theory; it was intended for my book with Van Vu but eventually got deleted as the book was already too big and getting unfocused.
59 comments
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11 December, 2012 at 7:49 pm
fedja
A small but very nice update. Artem’s student Jaegil Kim finally proved that all Hanner polytopes give you local minima. See http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.2544. Comments are welcome :).
24 January, 2014 at 11:02 am
Samuel Reid
I have a proof of the Mahler conjecture which I have uploaded to arXiv. I have been working for about 6 months on the conjecture and managed to solve it with an insight regarding the representation of d-dimensional metric quantities in terms of 2d-dimensional metric quantities.
E-mail me if you are interested in the proof before it appears on arXiv under
“Minimizing the Mahler Volume of Symmetric Convex Bodies”.
24 January, 2014 at 2:11 pm
Samuel Reid
Well, I realized I claimed an inequality that I still need to prove, so I will try and fix it and then make a comment regarding my correct or failed proof strategy after I have done more work.
7 August, 2019 at 9:05 pm
Johan Aspegren
It has been proved that if the isotropic constant conjecture/Bourgain`s slicing conjecture is fails, the Mahler conjecture fails, and an exact bound to the isotopic constant implies the Mahler conjecture. I have proved the isotropic constant conjecture. The proof can be found in here: http://vixra.org/pdf/1810.0303vA.pdf
12 August, 2019 at 7:35 am
Johan Aspegren
This reply of mine contained some thinkos/typos. An exact bound should be exact bound with respect to dimension. I couldn`t find reference for the first claim, but it is quite easy to proof. This is a bit risky for me, because there seems to be no edit button and I can`t see my comment in it`s final form as in some other blogs. Let
be an isotropic unit ball. Then the isotropic constant is
The proof works the same if
is the isotropic version of
with
Let
be the euclidean unit ball. Thus,
as it is well known that
for any 
15 January, 2020 at 4:41 am
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9 October, 2022 at 1:36 pm
Alejandro Vicente
In 2013 it was shown a deep connection between the Mahler Conjecture and another Conjecture in Symplectic Geometry, namely, the Viterbo isoperimetric Conjecture. It turns out that the former is equivalent to a special case fo the latter.
This Viterbo Conjecture deals with the relation between symplectic capacities (some sort of two dimensional “measures” that can be taken in symplectic manifolds, dependent on the symplectic form) and the volume of this manifold (the volume form provided by the symplectic form), roughly speaking, it claims that the ratio of this quantities is bounded. These symplectic capacities can be varied in nature, they can be defined using symplectic embeddings, action selectors in dynamics associated to the symplectic manifolds, etc.
There is a particular one, the Hofer-Zehnder capacity, defined from dynamical information. It has been proven that the Mahler Conjecture holds if and only if the Viterbo Conjecture holds for the Hofer-Zehnder capacity on the class of symplectic submanifolds of
for
a convex body.
This Viterbo Conjecture is (obviously) still wide open, only proven in a few selected cases, which do not include the equivalent setting to the Mahler Conjecture.
Here is the arxiv link to the paper from Arstein-Avidan, Karasev and Ostrover proving the equivalence:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.4197
10 October, 2022 at 9:34 am
Johan Aspegren
In my previous comments I spoke about the nonsymmetric Mahler conjecture. There indeed is a unique minimizer (the simplex) for the inner volume-ratio in the nonsymmetric case. Suppose that the cross polytope
(the dual of the cube) would be the unique minimizer for the inner volume ratio in the symmetric case. This is defined up to affine transformation as
where
is the standard unit ball. It is an established fact that the cube
is the unique maximizer for
Thus, if the
would be the unique minimizer of the volume ratio then for any
we would have
The above (A) would easily imply the Mahler conjecture because both the standard cross polytope and the standard cube have the maximal Banach-Mazur distance to the Euclidean unit ball. In the case if there is a set inclusion for the unit balls
then (A) will still hold. But because
is not the unique minimizer, it actually shows that
is not even minimizer for the inner volume ratio 
Now to the point: the cross polytope
maximises the outer volume ratio
So it minimizes
It's then clear that the ratio
is maximized when
. This ratio is at least in that case the Mahler product of the cross polytope.
10 October, 2022 at 10:31 am
Johan Aspegren
Ok. In the ratio calculation: The unit ball should have been the unit cube and the ratio should have been the other way around, so that the ratio gets minimized not maximised. And the ratio in a fixed dimension is a scaled version of the Mahler Volume.