A Combinatorial Property of Points and Ellipsoids.
A lower bound for the number of comparisons is obtained, required by a computational problem of classification of an arbitrarily chosen point of the Euclidean space with respect to a given finite family of polyhedral (non-convex, in general) sets, covering the space. This lower bound depends, roughly speaking, on the minimum number of convex parts, into which one can decompose these polyhedral sets. The lower bound is then applied to the knapsack problem.
A closed convex subset C of a Banach space X is called approximatively polyhedral if for each ε > 0 there is a polyhedral (= intersection of finitely many closed half-spaces) convex set P ⊂ X at Hausdorff distance < ε from C. We characterize approximatively polyhedral convex sets in Banach spaces and apply the characterization to show that a connected component of the space of closed convex subsets of X endowed with the Hausdorff metric is separable if and only if contains a polyhedral convex...