Cylinder coverings below the half-area bound

What OpenAI claims

Covers the entire closed regular tetrahedron by finitely many cylinders with compact triangular perpendicular bases whose total area is less than half its smallest orthogonal projection area. This disproves Bang's half-area cylinder-covering bound and the stronger directionwise normalized conjecture in dimension three. (Lean)

Papers (4)

1. Finite angular cylinder covers below the half-area bound

   27 September 2026 · Preprint, not peer reviewed · PDF

   OpenAI's abstract A regular tetrahedron admits a finite cylinder covering with compact triangular perpendicular bases whose total area is less than half its minimum orthogonal projection area. This disproves the half-area cylinder-covering conjecture. By affine invariance, the same construction gives a counterexample to the directionwise normalized half-bound for every nondegenerate tetrahedron.

2. Finite cylinder approximation of ruled sets

   27 September 2026 · Preprint, not peer reviewed · PDF

   OpenAI's abstract We approximate compact ruled families of segments by finitely many cylinders with square intercept tiles and perpendicular-base area at most their integral projection cost plus any positive error. The velocity field is C1, and its differential has opposite real eigenvalues whose magnitudes are strictly below the inverse segment half-length; both eigenvalues may vanish. The result includes square-zero differentials with unrestricted shear and fields that pass between the two regimes. It holds for arbitrary compact label sets.

3. Slope-field perturbations of the two-cylinder covering

   27 September 2026 · Preprint, not peer reviewed · PDF

   OpenAI's abstract The two-cylinder covering of a regular tetrahedron can be perturbed to give finite covers with total perpendicular base area strictly below half its minimum projection area. These covers give negative answers to both the half-area question and the directionwise normalized half-bound conjecture. By affine invariance, the directionwise conclusion holds for every nondegenerate tetrahedron.

4. Finite triangular approximation of radial sweeps

   27 September 2026 · Preprint, not peer reviewed · PDF

   OpenAI's abstract We prove that radially aligned segment sweeps admit finite cylinder covers with one triangular base for each interval of any tagged partition. As the mesh tends to zero, the total perpendicular base area converges to a weighted parameter area. An explicit application covers every regular tetrahedron with total base area below half its minimum projection area, giving negative answers to the half-area question and the directionwise normalized 1-Codimensional Cylinder Covering Conjecture.

Status

Preprint. The papers have not been independently reviewed. Treat the result as OpenAI's claim until other mathematicians have checked it. If a video exists, it illustrates the statement; it is not the proof.