Convex hull: $n+1$ points suffice in dimension $n$?

824 Views Asked by At

Let $S \subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$ for some $n \in \mathbb{N}$. The convex hull of $S$ is defined to be

$$ \left\lbrace \sum_{i=1}^k \lambda_i x_i \mid k \in \mathbb{N}, x_i \in S, \lambda_i \in \mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}, \sum_{i=1}^k \lambda_i = 1 \right\rbrace. $$

It feels intuitively clear to me that one should be able to replace this by

$$ \left\lbrace \sum_{i=1}^{n+1} \lambda_i x_i \mid x_i \in S, \lambda_i \in \mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}, \sum_{i=1}^{n+1} \lambda_i = 1 \right\rbrace, $$ that is, that every point in the convex hull can actually be written as the convex combination of some $n+1$ points from the original set (depending on the chosen point of course). Is there a short argument for this?

1

There are 1 best solutions below

1
On BEST ANSWER

This is Carathéodory's theorem. Wikipedia has a short argument.