We consider scattering of a time harmonic incident plane wave by a convex polygon with piecewise constant impedance boundary conditions. Standard finite or boundary element methods require the number of degrees of freedom to grow at least linearly with respect to the frequency of the incident wave in order to maintain accuracy. Extending earlier work by Chandler-Wilde and Langdon for the sound soft problem, we propose a novel Galerkin boundary element method, with the approximation space consisting of the products of plane waves with piecewise polynomials supported on a graded mesh with smaller elements closer to the corners of the polygon. Theoretical analysis and numerical results suggest that the number of degrees of freedom required to achieve a prescribed level of accuracy grows only logarithmically with respect to the frequency of the incident wave.

The ‘scanning process' Z(t), t ∈ ℝk of the title is a Gaussian random field obtained by associating with Z(t) the value of a set-indexed Brownian motion on the translate t + A0 of some ‘scanning set' A0. We study the basic properties of the random field Z relating, for example, its continuity and other sample path properties to the geometrical properties of A0. We ask if the set A0 determines the scanning process, and investigate when, and how, it is possible to recover the structure of A0 from realisations of the sample paths of the random field Z.

It is shown that the convex polygons are uniquely determined (up to translation and reflection) by their covariograms. The covariogram can be represented by the ‘orientation-dependent chord length distribution', i.e. the distribution of the length of chords which are generated by random lines parallel to fixed directions. Thus the result contributes to answer Blaschke's question about the content of information comprised in chord length distributions.