Partitions of mass assignments with spheres and wedges

Abstract

In this paper, we generalize classic mass partition results dealing with partitions using spheres, parallel hyperplanes, or axis-parallel wedges to the setting of mass assignments. In a mass assignment problem, we assign mass distributions continuously to all $k$-dimensional subspaces of ${\mathbb{R}}^d$, and seek to guarantee the existence of a particular subspace in which more masses can be bisected than those by analyzing the problem in ${\mathbb{R}}^k$. We prove new mass assignment results for spheres, parallel hyperplanes, and axis-parallel wedges. The proof techniques rely on new Borsuk--Ulam type theorems on spheres and Stiefel manifolds.

13 pages, 3 figures