Applications of Convex Analysis to the Smallest Intersecting Ball Problem

The smallest enclosing circle problem asks for the circle of smallest radius enclosing a given set of finite points on the plane. This problem was introduced in the 19th century by Sylvester [17]. After more than a century, the problem remains very active. This paper is the continuation of our effort in shedding new light to classical geometry problems using advanced tools of convex analysis and optimization. We propose and study the following generalized version of the smallest enclosing circle problem: given a finite number of nonempty closed convex sets in a reflexive Banach space, find a ball with the smallest radius that intersects all of the sets.