The central set and its application to the Kneser-Poulsen conjecture

Abstract

The Kneser-Poulsen conjecture says that if a finite collection of balls in a Euclidean (spherical or hyperbolic) space is rearranged so that the distance between each pair of centers does not increase, then the volume of the union of these balls does not increase as well. We give new results about central sets of subsets of a Riemannian manifold and apply these results to prove new special cases of the Kneser-Poulsen conjecture in the two-dimensional sphere and the hyperbolic plane.