Convex hull deviation and contractibility

Abstract

We study the Hausdorff distance between a set and its convex hull. Let $X$ be a Banach space, define the CHD-constant of the space $X$ as the supremum of this distance over all subsets of the unit ball in $X$. In the case of finite dimensional Banach spaces we obtain the exact upper bound of the CHD-constant depending on the dimension of the space. We give an upper bound for the CHD-constant in $L_p$ spaces. We prove that the CHD-constant is not greater than the maximum of Lipschitz constants of metric projection operators onto hyperplanes. This implies that for a Hilbert space the CHD-constant equals $1$. We prove a characterization of Hilbert spaces and study the contractibility of proximally smooth sets in a uniformly convex and uniformly smooth Banach space.