Projections and circles

Large sets in Euclidean space should have large projections in most directions. Projection theorems in geometric measure theory make this intuition precise, by quantifying the words “large” and “most”.

How large can a planar set be if it contains a circle of every radius? This is the quintessential example of a curvilinear Kakeya problem, central to many areas of harmonic analysis and incidence geometry.

What do projections have to do with circles?

The talk will survey a few landmark results in these areas and point to a newly discovered connection between the two.