Spherical designs, discrepancy and numerical integration

Abstract

A spherical design is a point configuration on the sphere, which yields exact equal-weight quadrature formulae for polynomials up to a given degree. Until now only very specific constructions for spherical designs are known. We establish connections to spherical cap discrepancy and show some general discrepancy bounds. Furthermore, we reformulate the problem of constructing designs as an optimization problem and develop an algorithm for finding ’practical designs’.