Cube is a strict local maximizer for the illumination number

Abstract

It was conjectured by Levi, Hadwiger, Gohberg and Markus that the boundary of any convex body in ${\mathbb R}^n$ can be illuminated by at most $2^n$ light sources, and, moreover, $2^n-1$ light sources suffice unless the body is a parallelotope. We show that if a convex body is close to the cube in the Banach-Mazur metric, and it is not a parallelotope, then indeed $2^n-1$ light sources suffice to illuminate its boundary. Equivalently, any convex body sufficiently close to the cube, but not isometric to it, can be covered by $2^n-1$ smaller homothetic copies of itself.