Central diagonal sections of the $n$-cube

Abstract

We prove that the volume of central hyperplane sections of a unit cube in $\mathbb{R}^n$ orthogonal to a diameter of the cube is a strictly monotonically increasing function of the dimension for $n\geq 3$. Our argument uses an integral formula that goes back to P\'olya \cite{P} (see also \cite{H} and \cite{B86}) for the volume of central sections of the cube, and Laplace's method to estimate the asymptotic behaviour of the integral. First we show that monotonicity holds starting from some specific $n_0$. Then, using interval arithmetic (IA) and automatic differentiation (AD), we compute an explicit bound for $n_0$, and check the remaining cases between $3$ and $n_0$ by direct computation.