On approximations by projections of polytopes with few facets

Abstract

We provide an affirmative answer to a problem posed by Barvinok and Veomett, showing that in general an n-dimensional convex body cannot be approximated by a projection of a section of a simplex of a sub-exponential dimension. Moreover, we establish a lower bound of the Banach-Mazur distance between n-dimensional projections of sections of an N-dimensional simplex and a certain convex symmetric body, which is sharp up to a logarithmic factor for all N>n.