The biggest little polygon with sides is the convex plane
-gon of unit polygon diameter
having largest possible area.
Reinhardt (1922) showed that for odd, the regular polygon
on
sides is the biggest little
-gon. For
, the square with diagonal 1 has
maximum area, but an infinite number of other 4-gons are equally large (Audet et
al. 2002). The
case was solved by Graham (1975) and is known as Graham's
biggest little hexagon, and the
case was solved by Audet et al. (2002). The following
table summarizes these results, showing the percentage that the given polygon is
larger than the regular
-gon.
area | % larger than
regular | reference | |
6 | 0.674981 | 3.92% | Graham (1975) |
8 | 0.726867 | 2.79% | Audet et al. (2002) |
The biggest little polygon graphs on and 8 nodes are implemented in the Wolfram
Language as GraphData[
"BiggestLittlePolygon",
n
].