The Floating Body Construction and Its Applications

Explore the floating body construction and its applications in geometry in this 54-minute lecture. Delve into the history of this mathematical concept, tracing its origins back to the 19th century and C. Dupin. Examine the definition and properties of floating bodies, and investigate their connection to Blaschke's affine surface area. Discover how the volume of floating bodies provides crucial geometric estimates for random polytopes generated from convex bodies. Learn about generalizations of the classical floating body construction, including weighted floating bodies, and understand how these extensions allow for the application of classical results in non-Euclidean spaces such as spherical and hyperbolic geometries.

Florian Besau: The floating body construction and its applications