Very recently J. Kotrbaty has proven general inequalities for translation invariant smooth valuations formally analogous to the Hodge- Riemann bilinear relations in the Kahler geometry. The goal of this note is to apply Kotrbatys theorem to obtain a few apparently new inequalities for mixed volumes of convex bodies.
The existence of a homogeneous decomposition for continuous and epi-translation invariant valuations on super-coercive functions is established. Continuous and epi-translation invariant valuations that are epi-homogeneous of degree $n$ are classified. By duality, corresponding results are obtained for valuations on finite-valued convex functions.
We study the class of (locally) anti-blocking bodies as well as some associated classes of convex bodies. For these bodies, we prove geometric inequalities regarding volumes and mixed volumes, including Godbersons conjecture, near-optimal bounds on Mahler volumes, Saint-Raymond-type inequalities on mixed volumes, and reverse Kleitman inequalities for mixed volumes. We apply our results to the combinatorics of posets and prove Sidorenko-type inequalities for linear extensions of pairs of 2-dimensional posets. The results rely on some elegant decompositions of differences of anti-blocking bodies, which turn out to hold for anti-blocking bodies with respect to general polyhedral cones.
The notion of a valuation on convex bodies is very classical. The notion of a valuation on a class of functions was recently introduced and studied by M. Ludwig and others. We study an explicit relation between continuous valuations on convex functions which are invariant under adding arbitrary linear functionals, and translations invariant continuous valuations on convex bodies. More precisely, we construct a natural linear map from the former space to the latter and prove that it has dense image and infinite dimensional kernel. The proof uses the authors irreducibility theorem and few properties of the real Monge-Ampere operators due to A.D. Alexandrov and Z. Blocki. Fur- thermore we show how to use complex, quaternionic, and octonionic Monge-Ampere operators to construct more examples of continuous valuations on convex functions in an analogous way.
We define a set inner product to be a function on pairs of convex bodies which is symmetric, Minkowski linear in each dimension, positive definite, and satisfies the natural analogue of the Cauchy-Schwartz inequality (which is not implied by the other conditions). We show that any set inner product can be embedded into an inner product space on the associated support functions, thereby extending fundamental results of Hormander and Radstrom. The set inner product provides a geometry on the space of convex bodies. We explore some of the properties of that geometry, and discuss an application of these ideas to the reconstruction of ancestral ecological niches in evolutionary biology.
There is a well known construction of weakly continuous valuations on convex compact polytopes in R^n. In this paper we investigate when a special case of this construction gives a valuation which extends by continuity in the Hausdorff metric to all convex compact subsets of R^n. It is shown that there is a necessary condition on the initial data for such an extension. In the case of R^3 more explicit results are obtained.