arXiv subjects

Muhammad A. Khan

Publications and source records attributed to Muhammad A. Khan.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2017

On contact graphs of totally separable domains

Contact graphs have emerged as an important tool in the study of translative packings of convex bodies. The contact number of a packing of translates of a convex body is the number of edges in the contact graph of the packing, while the Hadwiger number of a convex body is the maximum vertex degree over all such contact graphs. In this paper, we investigate the Hadwiger and contact numbers of totally separable packings of convex domains, which we refer to as the separable Hadwiger number and the separable contact number, respectively. We show that the separable Hadwiger number of any smooth convex domain is $4$ and the maximum separable contact number of any packing of $n$ translates of a smooth strictly convex domain is $\left\lfloor 2n - 2\sqrt{n}\right\rfloor$. Our proofs employ a characterization of total separability in terms of hemispherical caps on the boundary of a convex body, Auerbach bases of finite dimensional real normed spaces, angle measures in real normed planes, minimal perimeter polyominoes and an approximation of smooth $o$-symmetric strictly convex domains by, what we call, Auerbach domains.

math.MG↗

arXiv2016

Short cycles in digraphs and the Caccetta-Häggkvist conjecture

In the theory of digraphs, the study of cycles is a subject of great importance and has given birth to a number of deep questions such as the Behzad-Chartrand-Wall conjecture (1970) and its generalization, the Caccetta-Häggkvist conjecture (1978). Despite a lot of interest and efforts, the progress on these remains slow and mostly restricted to the solution of some special cases. In this note, we prove these conjectures for digraphs with girth is at least as large as their minimum out-degree and without short even cycles. More generally, we prove that if a digraph has sufficiently large girth and does not contain closed walks of certain lengths, then the conjectures hold. The proof makes use of some of the known results on the Caccetta-Häggkvist conjecture, properties of direct products of digraphs and a construction that multiplies the girth of a digraph.

math.CO↗

arXiv2016

The geometry of homothetic covering and illumination

At a first glance, the problem of illuminating the boundary of a convex body by external light sources and the problem of covering a convex body by its smaller positive homothetic copies appear to be quite different. They are in fact two sides of the same coin and give rise to one of the important longstanding open problems in discrete geometry, namely, the Illumination Conjecture. In this paper, we survey the activity in the areas of discrete geometry, computational geometry and geometric analysis motivated by this conjecture. Special care is taken to include the recent advances that are not covered by the existing surveys. We also include some of our recent results related to these problems and describe two new approaches -- one conventional and the other computer-assisted -- to make progress on the illumination problem. Some open problems and conjectures are also presented.

math.MG↗

arXiv2016

Contact numbers for sphere packings

In discrete geometry, the contact number of a given finite number of non-overlapping spheres was introduced as a generalization of Newton's kissing number. This notion has not only led to interesting mathematics, but has also found applications in the science of self-assembling materials, such as colloidal matter. With geometers, chemists, physicists and materials scientists researching the topic, there is a need to inform on the state of the art of the contact number problem. In this paper, we investigate the problem in general and emphasize important special cases including contact numbers of minimally rigid and totally separable sphere packings. We also discuss the complexity of recognizing contact graphs in a fixed dimension. Moreover, we list some conjectures and open problems.

math.MG↗

arXiv2015

On the covering index of convex bodies

Covering a convex body by its homothets is a classical notion in discrete geometry that has resulted in a number of interesting and long-standing problems. Swanepoel introduced the covering parameter of a convex body as a means of quantifying its covering properties. In this paper, we introduce two relatives of the covering parameter called covering index and weak covering index, which upper bound well-studied quantities like the illumination number, the illumination parameter and the covering parameter of a convex body. Intuitively, the two indices measure how well a convex body can be covered by a relatively small number of homothets having the same relatively small homothety ratio. We show that the covering index is a lower semicontinuous functional on the Banach-Mazur space of convex bodies. We further show that the affine d-cubes minimize covering index in any dimension d, while circular disks maximize it in the plane. Furthermore, the covering index satisfies a nice compatibility with the operations of direct vector sum and vector sum. In fact, we obtain an exact formula for the covering index of a direct vector sum of convex bodies that works in infinitely many instances. This together with a minimization property can be used to determine the covering index of infinitely many convex bodies. As the name suggests, the weak covering index loses some of the important properties of the covering index. Finally, we obtain upper bounds on the covering and weak covering index.

math.MG↗