Smallest-circle problem

The minimum covering circle problem is a mathematical problem of computing a smallest enclosing circle of a set S of given N points in Rⁿ, which was initially proposed by Sylvester in 1987. This problem is also called minimum covering circle problem. In two dimensional space, the problem is a well known single facility location problem which locates a new facility to provide service to a number of customers or facilities. We can formulate the minimum covering circle problem as the minimax programming problem:

$minmax||x-s||$

External links

• Bernd Gärtner's smallest enclosing ball code
• Miniball open source project for smallest enclosing balls