Abstract:

By analogy with the conjecture of Hirsch, we conjecture that the order of the largest total curvature of the central path associated to a polytope is the number of inequalities defining the polytope. By analogy with a result of Dedieu, Malajovich and Shub, we conjecture that the average diameter of a bounded cell of an arrangement is less than the dimension. We substantiate these conjectures in low dimensions, highlight additional links, and prove a continuous analogue of the d-step conjecture.