# Midpoint Polygon Conjecture is false

Standard

Contrary to my expectations, my previous post turned out to be like  Popular-­Lonely primes and Decimal Problem, i.e. I discovered nothing new.

My conjecture is false. Following counterexample is given on pp. 234 of this paper:

Counterexample of the conjecture, taken from: Berlekamp, E. R., E. N. Gilbert, and F. W. Sinden. “A Polygon Problem.” The American Mathematical Monthly 72, no. 3 (1965): 233-41. doi:10.2307/2313689.

As pointed out by uncombed_coconut, the correct theorem is:

Theorem (Berlekamp-Gilbert-Sinden, 1965). For almost all simple polygons there exist a smallest natural number $k$ such that after $k$ iterations of midpoint polygon procedure, we obtain a convex polygon.

The proof of this theorem is very interesting. Till now I thought that proving euclidean geometry theorems using complex numbers was an overkill. But using an N-tuple of complex numbers to represent the vertices of a closed polygon (in given order),  $\mathbf{z} = (z_1,\ldots , z_N)$,  we can restate the problem in terms of eigenvectors (referred to as eigenpolygons) and eigenvalues.  Following are the crucial facts used is the proof:

• An arbitrary N-gon (need not be simple) can be written as a sum of regular N-gons i.e. the eigenvalues are distinct.
• The coefficient of $k^{th}$ eigenvector (when N-gon is written as linear combination of eigenpolygons) is the centroid of the polygon obtained by “winding” $\mathbf{z}$ $k$ times.
• All vertices of the midpoint polygons (obtained by repeating the midpoint polygon procedure infinitely many times) converge to the centroid.
• The sum of two convex components of $\mathbf{z}$ is a polygon. This polygon is the affine image of a regular convex N-gon whose all vertices lie on an ellipse. (as pointed out by Nikhil)
• A necessary and sufficient condition for $\mathbf{z}$ to have a convex midpoint polygon (after some finite iterations of the midpoint polygon procedure) is that the ellipse circumscribing the sum of two convex components of $\mathbf{z}$ is nondegenerate. (The degenerate form of an ellipse is a point. )

For a nice outline of the proof, please refer to the comment by uncombed_coconut on previous post.

Since I didn’t know that this is a well studied problem (and that too by a well known mathematician!) I was trying to prove it on my own. Though I didn’t make much progress, but I discovered some interesting theorems which I will share in my future posts.