Antinorms and Radon curves

Abstract

In this paper we consider two notions that have been discovered and rediscovered by geometers and analysts since 1917 up to the present day: Radon curves and antinorms. A Radon curve is a special kind of centrally symmetric closed convex curve in the plane. A Radon plane is a normed plane obtained by using a Radon curve as (the boundary of) the unit ball. Many known results in Euclidean geometry also hold for Radon planes, for example the triangle and parallelogram area formulas, certain theorems on angular bisectors, the area formula of a polygon circumscribed about a circle, certain isoperimetric inequalities, and the non-expansive property of certain non-linear projections. These results may be further generalized to arbitrary normed planes if we formally change the statement of the result by referring in some places to the antinorm instead of the norm. The antinorm is a norm dual to the norm of an arbitrarily given normed plane, although it lives in the same plane as the original norm. It is the purpose of this mainly expository paper to give a list of results on antinorms that generalize results true for Radon norms, and in many cases characterize Radon norms among all norms in the plane. Many of the results are old, well-known, and have often been rediscovered. However, for most of the results we give streamlined proofs. Also, some of the characterizations of Radon curves given here seem not to have appeared previously in print.