The Geometry of Homothetic Covering and Illumination

Abstract

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.