A discrete approach to Zhang’s projection inequality

Abstract In this article, we will provide a new proof of the fact that for any convex body $K\subseteq \mathbb {R}^n$ , $$ \begin{align*}\frac{{{2n}\choose{n}}}{n^n}n\int_0^\infty r^{n-1}\mathrm{vol}_n(K\cap(re_n+K))dr\leq\frac{(\mathrm{vol}_n(K))^{n+1}}{(\mathrm{vol}_{n-1}(P_{e_n^\perp}(K)))^n}, \end{align*} $$ where $(e_i)_{i=1}^n$ denotes the canonical orthonormal basis in $\mathbb {R}^n$ , $P_{e_n^\perp }(K)$ denotes the orthogonal projection of K onto the linear hyperplane orthogonal to $e_n$ , and $\mathrm {vol}_k$ denotes the k -dimensional Lebesgue measure. This inequality was proved by Gardner and Zhang and it implies Zhang’s inequality. We will use our new approach to this inequality in order to prove discrete analogs of this inequality and of an equivalent version of it, where we will consider the lattice point enumerator measure instead of the Lebesgue measure, and show that from such discrete analogs we can recover the aforementioned inequality and, therefore, Zhang’s inequality.