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Omri Abas
Mathematics · Research articles

Width distributions for rectangular boxes

Omri AbasORCID (Independent Researcher)

PreprintNot peer reviewed

Abstract

For a rectangular box with edges a1,a2,a3a_1,a_2,a_3, the width in a uniform random direction u∈S2u \in S^2 is w=∑iai∣ui∣w=\sum_i a_i|u_i|. Under a bijective change of parameters this is also the projected area of a rectangular parallelepiped, whose distribution was derived by Walters. We give a direct co-area derivation that recasts the law as one global positive-part formula and integrates it to an elementary closed cumulative distribution function. The density is real-analytic except at the edge lengths, face diagonals and space diagonal. We classify every singularity as a corner, square-root fold, superposition or terminal jump and compute its coefficient. A Gaussian representation gives all moments from one generating function. The degree of the nnth cumulant in π−1π^{-1} is exactly ⌊n/2⌋\lfloor n/2 \rfloor; at every order the mean-normalised cumulant is a polynomial in two scale-invariant combinations of the intrinsic volumes, with explicit formulas given through fifth order. The first three cumulants determine the box, and we characterise the admissible triples. Beyond boxes, intrinsic volumes determine neither width variance nor brightness variance. The sign-pattern representation extends to bodies whose central symmetral is a zonotope, while the cellwise co-area method applies to every full-dimensional polytope.

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Details

Keywords
Width function, Mean width, Brightness, Projection body, Zonotope, Intrinsic volumes, Cosine transform, Geometric probability
MSC 2020
52A22, 52A20, 52A38, 60D05
First posted
4 August 2026
arXiv versions
  • v1 (2026-08-04)

How to cite

Text
Omri Abas (2026). Width distributions for rectangular boxes. arXiv:2608.03305. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21780025
BibTeX
@misc{abas2026,
  title = {{Width distributions for rectangular boxes}},
  author = {Omri Abas},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.21780025},
  eprint = {2608.03305},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv}
}