cover of Geometric Tomography, Second Edition, by Richard J. Gardner

Geometric Tomography

In recent years my research has been in a new field called Geometric Tomography, an area of mathematics dealing with the retrieval of information about a geometric object from data concerning its projections ("shadows") on planes and/or sections by planes. The subject has connections with convex geometry, stereology, geometric probing in robotics, computerized tomography, and other areas. The second edition of my 1995 book "Geometric Tomography" was published by Cambridge University Press (New York) in June 2006, and is available in both hardback and paperback. It is designed to be somewhat accessible even to advanced undergraduate students, and contains 79 computer-generated pictures, 66 open problems, and 872 references.

UPDATE to the second edition, version 1.8. (Changes since the previous version 1.7 are highlighted here.) This file contains a list of corrections and reports on the current status of the open problems stated at the end of each chapter. The latter include the notorious slicing problem (or hyperplane conjecture, Problem 8.3) and Mahler's conjecture (Problem 9.2).

My research on geometric tomography has been supported by the National Science Foundation under grants number DMS-9201508, DMS-9501289, DMS-9802388, DMS-0203527, DMS-0603307, DMS-1103612, and DMS-1402929. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Related Links

See the main page for geometric tomography for a quite comprehensive introduction to the subject, with examples, theory, and some working algorithms.

There is a rudimentary Wikipedia page for Geometric Tomography (not written by me!).

Workshop on Geometric Tomography and Harmonic Analysis, Banff International Research Station, Canada, March 9 to 14, 2014.

Workshop on Discrete and Geometric Tomography, and Applications to Computer Algorithms, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, April 22 and 23, 2010.

Second Summer School on Stereology and Geometric Tomography, Sandbjerg Estate, Denmark, June 17 to 21, 2002.

First Summer School on Local Stereology and Geometric Tomography, Sandbjerg Estate, Denmark, May 20 to 25, 2000.

Another Geometric Tomography web page with a nice animation of 3-dimensional sections of a 4-dimensional cube.

Discrete Tomography is a related area with a life of its own.

There is a large overlap between geometric tomography and convex geometry. Some nice photos, including a group photo of the convex geometry community as it was fifteen years ago, can be found via the following link.

Workshop on Geometric Inequalities, Florence, Italy, May 16 to 20, 2005.


Recent Papers (PDF files for published versions of most of my earlier papers are available on request)

Some auxiliary material for published papers:

PostScript version PDF version An early version of my paper The Brunn-Minkowski inequality, Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 39 (2002), 355-405 that contains several full proofs.

PostScript version PDF version The proof of estimate (7) in R. J. Gardner and Peyman Milanfar, Reconstruction of convex bodies from brightness functions, Discrete Comput. Geom. 29 (2003), 279-303.

PDF version An extended version of: R. J. Gardner, Markus Kiderlen, and Peyman Milanfar, Convergence of algorithms for reconstructing convex bodies and directional measures, Ann. Statist. 34 (2006), 1331-1374.

Papers recently published:

PDF version R. J. Gardner, Washek Pfeffer (obituary), Real Anal. Exchange 46 (2021), 269-278.

PDF version Gabriele Bianchi, R. J. Gardner, and Paolo Gronchi, Full rotational symmetry from reflections or rotational symmetries in finitely many subspaces, Indiana Univ. Math. J. 71 (2022), 767-784.

PDF version Gabriele Bianchi, R. J. Gardner, and Paolo Gronchi, Convergence of symmetrization processes, Indiana Univ. Math. J. 71 (2022), 785-817.

PDF version Walter R. Bloom, R. J. Gardner, Al Hales, Joel Spencer, Terence Tao, and Benjamin Weiss, Robert Israel "Bob" Jewett (1937-2022) (obituary), Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 70 (2023), 772-781.

PDF version Gabriele Bianchi, R. J. Gardner, Paolo Gronchi, and Markus Kiderlen, The Pólya-Szegö inequality for smoothing rearrangements, J. Funct. Anal. 287 (2024), Paper No. 110442, 56 pp.

Preprints:

PDF files for published versions of most of my earlier papers are available on request. To see a full list of publications, consult my PDF version curriculum vitae or the excellent MathSciNet search engine, where reviews and citations can also be found. Here is a link to my Google Scholar page.


Richard J. Gardner's home page