A Branch-and-Bound Approach for Estimating Covering Functionals of Convex Bodies

Estimating covering functionals of convex bodies is not only interesting for its own, but also an important part of Chuanming Zong’s program to attack Hadwiger’s covering conjecture, a long-standing open problem from Discrete and Combinatorial Geometry. In general, it is difficult to determine exact values of the covering functionals of a convex body by theoretical analysis. Therefore we propose a global optimization algorithm based on the geometric branch-and-bound method. Numerical experiments have been carried out to estimate covering functionals of the Euclidean unit disc.