Abstract: | We extend and sharpen the characterization of radial sums of ridge functions of two variables given in an earlier paper. More precisely, a bound on the degree of certain polynomials is given which depends on the angles between the ridges; not only is this bound best possible but also a converse result holds. Furthermore, variants of this characterization which hold for higher dimensional analogues are also given. These results are then applied to certain parallel am models in computed tomography to obtain more precise and otherwise improved characterizations of algorithms which commute with rigid motions. |