Isoperimetric Polygons of Maximum Width

The value is shown to be an upper bound on the width of any n-sided polygon with unit perimeter. This bound is reached when n is not a power of 2, and the corresponding optimal solutions are the regular polygons when n is odd and clipped regular Reuleaux polygons when n is even but not a power of 2. Using a global optimization algorithm, we show that the optimal width for the quadrilateral is with a precision of 10⁻⁴. We propose two mathematical programs to determine the maximum width when n=2 ^s with s≥3 and provide approximate, but near-optimal, solutions obtained by various heuristics and local optimization for n=8, 16, and 32. Work of the first author was supported by NSERC grant 239436-01, AFOSR FA9550-07-1-0302, and ExxonMobil. Work of the second author was supported by NSERC grant 239436-01.