We report on enumerating the triangulations of cyclic polytopes with the new software mptopcom. This is relevant for its connection with higher Stasheff-Tamari orders, which occur in category theory and algebraic combinatorics.
We show that Simion's type $B$ associahedron is combinatorially equivalent to a pulling triangulation of a type $B$ root polytope called the Legendre polytope. Furthermore, we show that every pulling triangulation of the Legendre polytope yields a flag complex. Our triangulation refines a decomposition of the Legendre polytope given by Cho. We extend Cho's cyclic group action to the triangulation in such a way that it corresponds to rotating centrally symmetric triangulations of a regular $(2n+2)$-gon. Finally, we present a bijection between the faces of the Simion's type $B$ associahedron and…
In this paper we give several criteria for the edge polytope of a fundamental FHM-graph to possess a regular unimodular triangulation in terms of some simple data of the the graph. We further apply our criteria to several examples of graphs and show that their edge polytopes possess a regular unimodular triangulation.
In this paper we study an alternating sign matrix analogue of the Chan-Robbins-Yuen polytope, which we call the ASM-CRY polytope. We show that this polytope has Catalan many vertices and its volume is equal to the number of standard Young tableaux of staircase shape; we also determine its Ehrhart polynomial. We achieve the previous by proving that the members of a family of faces of the alternating sign matrix polytope which includes ASM-CRY are both order and flow polytopes. Inspired by the above results, we relate three established triangulations of order and flow polytopes, namely Stanley's…
This work regards the order polytopes arising from the class of generalized snake posets and their posets of meet-irreducible elements. Among generalized snake posets of the same rank, we characterize those whose order polytopes have minimal and maximal volume. We give a combinatorial characterization of the circuits in these order polytopes and then conclude that every triangulation is unimodular. For a generalized snake word, we count the number of flips for the canonical triangulation of these order polytopes. We determine that the flip graph of the order polytope of the poset whose lattice…
Let $Φ$ be an irreducible crystallographic root system and $\mathcal P$ its root polytope, i.e., its convex hull. We provide a uniform construction, for all root types, of a triangulation of the facets of $\mathcal P$. We also prove that, on each orbit of facets under the action of the Weyl gruop, the triangulation is unimodular with respect to a root sublattice that depends on the orbit.
In this paper we show that the pipe dream complex associated to the permutation 1n(n-1)...2 can be geometrically realized as a triangulation of the vertex figure of a root polytope. Leading up to this result we show that the Grothendieck polynomial specializes to the h-polynomial of the corresponding pipe dream complex, which in certain cases equals the h-polynomial of canonical triangulations of root (and flow) polytopes, which in turn equals a specialization of the reduced form of a monomial in the subdivision algebra of root (and flow) polytopes. Thus, we connect Grothendieck polynomials to…
An integral polytope is a polytope whose vertices have integer coordinates. A unimodular triangulation of an integral polytope in $\mathbb{R}^d$ is a triangulation in which all simplices are integral with volume $1/d!$. A classic result of Knudsen, Mumford, and Waterman states that for every integral polytope $P$, there exists a positive integer $c$ such that $cP$ has a unimodular triangulation. We strengthen this result by showing that for every integral polytope $P$, there exists $c$ such that for every positive integer $c' \ge c$, $c'P$ admits a unimodular triangulation. This answers a long…
Cayley polytopes were defined recently as convex hulls of Cayley compositions introduced by Cayley in 1857. In this paper we resolve Braun's conjecture, which expresses the volume of Cayley polytopes in terms of the number of connected graphs. We extend this result to two one-variable deformations of Cayley polytopes (which we call t-Cayley and t-Gayley polytopes), and to the most general two-variable deformations, which we call Tutte polytopes. The volume of the latter is given via an evaluation of the Tutte polynomial of the complete graph. Our approach is based on an explicit triangulation …
Triangulations of a product of two simplices and, more generally, of root polytopes are closely related to Gelfand-Kapranov-Zelevinsky's theory of discriminants, to tropical geometry, tropical oriented matroids, and to generalized permutohedra. We introduce a new approach to these objects, identifying a triangulation of a root polytope with a certain bijection between lattice points of two generalized permutohedra. In order to study such bijections, we define trianguloids as edge-colored graphs satisfying simple local axioms. We prove that trianguloids are in bijection with triangulations of r…
Subword complexes are simplicial complexes introduced by Knutson and Miller to illustrate the combinatorics of Schubert polynomials and determinantal ideals. They proved that any subword complex is homeomorphic to a ball or a sphere and asked about their geometric realizations. We show that a family of subword complexes can be realized geometrically via regular triangulations of root polytopes. This implies that a family of $β$-Grothendieck polynomials are special cases of reduced forms in the subdivision algebra of root polytopes. We can also write the volume and Ehrhart series of root polyto…
The problem of finding a triangulation of a convex three-dimensional polytope with few tetrahedra is proved to be NP-hard. We discuss other related complexity results.
We prove a bijection between the triangulations of the 3-dimensional cyclic polytope C(n+2, 3) and persistent graphs with n vertices. We show that under this bijection the Stasheff-Tamari orders on triangulations naturally translate to subgraph inclusion between persistent graphs. Moreover, we describe a connection to the second higher Bruhat order B(n, 2). We additionally give an algorithm to efficiently enumerate all persistent graphs on n vertices and thus all triangulations of C(n+2, 3).
The aim of this paper is to study alcoved polytopes, which are polytopes arising from affine Coxeter arrangements. This class of convex polytopes includes many classical polytopes, for example, the hypersimplices. We compare two constructions of triangulations of hypersimplices due to Stanley and Sturmfels and explain them in terms of alcoved polytopes. We study triangulations of alcoved polytopes, the adjacency graphs of these triangulations, and give a combinatorial formula for volumes of these polytopes. In particular, we study a class of matroid polytopes, which we call the multi-hypersimp…
The full root polytope of type $A$ is the convex hull of all pairwise differences of the standard basis vectors which we represent by forward and backward arrows. We completely classify all flag triangulations of this polytope that are uniform in the sense that the edges may be described as a function of the relative order of the indices of the four basis vectors involved. These fifteen triangulations fall naturally into three classes: three in the lex class, three in the revlex class and nine in the Simion class. We also consider a refined face count where we distinguish between forward and b…
A cosmological polytope is defined for a given Feynman diagram, and its canonical form may be used to compute the contribution of the Feynman diagram to the wavefunction of certain cosmological models. Given a subdivision of a polytope, its canonical form is obtained as a sum of the canonical forms of the facets of the subdivision. In this paper, we identify such formulas for the canonical form via algebraic techniques. It is shown that the toric ideal of every cosmological polytope admits a Gröbner basis with a squarefree initial ideal, yielding a regular unimodular triangulation of the polyt…
A seminal result in the theory of toric varieties, due to Knudsen, Mumford and Waterman (1973), asserts that for every lattice polytope $P$ there is a positive integer $k$ such that the dilated polytope $kP$ has a unimodular triangulation. In dimension 3, Kantor and Sarkaria (2003) have shown that $k=4$ works for every polytope. But this does not imply that every $k>4$ works as well. We here study the values of $k$ for which the result holds showing that: 1. It contains all composite numbers. 2. It is an additive semigroup. These two properties imply that the only values of $k$ that may not wo…
We construct a large family of neighborly polytopes that can be realized with all the vertices on the boundary of any smooth strictly convex body. In particular, we show that there are superexponentially many combinatorially distinct neighborly polytopes that admit realizations inscribed on the sphere. These are the first examples of inscribable neighborly polytopes that are not cyclic polytopes, and provide the current best lower bound for the number of combinatorial types of inscribable polytopes (which coincides with the current best lower bound for the number of combinatorial types of poly…
The type A_n full root polytope is the convex hull in R^{n+1} of the origin and the points e_i-e_j for 1<= i<j <= n+1. Given a tree T on the vertex set [n+1], the associated root polytope P(T) is the intersection of the full root polytope with the cone generated by the vectors e_i-e_j, where (i, j) is an edge of T, i<j. The reduced forms of a certain monomial m[T] in commuting variables x_{ij} under the reduction x_{ij}x_{jk} --> x_{ik}x_{ij}+x_{jk}x_{ik}+βx_{ik}, can be interpreted as triangulations of P(T). Using these triangulations, the volume and Ehrhart polynomial of P(T) are obtained. I…
The Birkhoff polytope, defined to be the convex hull of $n\times n$ permutation matrices, is a well studied polytope in the context of the Ehrhart theory. This polytope is known to have many desirable properties, such as the Gorenstein property and existence of regular, unimodular triangulations. In this paper, we study analogues of the Birkhoff polytope for finite irreducible Coxeter groups of other types. We focus on a type-$B$ Birkhoff polytope $\mathcal{BB}(n)$ arising from signed permutation matrices and prove that it and its dual polytope are reflexive, and hence Gorenstein, and also pos…
With the $[0,1,2]$-family of cyclic triangulations we introduce a rich class of vertex-transitive triangulations of surfaces. In particular, there are infinite series of cyclic $q$-equivelar triangulations of orientable and non-orientable surfaces for every $q=3k$, $k\geq 2$, and every $q=3k+1$, $k\geq 3$. Series of cyclic tessellations of surfaces are derived from these triangulated series.
Polytope numbers for a polytope are a sequence of nonnegative integers that are defined by the facial information of a polytope. Every polygon is triangulable and a higher dimensional analogue of this fact states that every polytope is triangulable, namely, every polytope can be decomposed into simplexes. Thus it may be possible to represent polytope numbers by sums of simplex numbers. We analyzes a special type of triangulation, called pointed triangulation, and develops several methods to represent polytope numbers by sums of simplex numbers.
Tightness of a triangulated manifold is a topological condition, roughly meaning that any simplexwise linear embedding of the triangulation into euclidean space is "as convex as possible". It can thus be understood as a generalization of the concept of convexity. In even dimensions, super-neighborliness is known to be a purely combinatorial condition which implies the tightness of a triangulation. Here we present other sufficient and purely combinatorial conditions which can be applied to the odd-dimensional case as well. One of the conditions is that all vertex links are stacked spheres, whic…
We prove that every primary basic semialgebraic set is homotopy equivalent to the set of inscribed realizations (up to Möbius transformation) of a polytope. If the semialgebraic set is moreover open, then, in addition, we prove that (up to homotopy) it is a retract of the realization space of some inscribed neighborly (and simplicial) polytope. We also show that all algebraic extensions of $\mathbb{Q}$ are needed to coordinatize inscribed polytopes. These statements show that inscribed polytopes exhibit the Mnëv universality phenomenon. Via stereographic projections, these theorems have a dire…
We wish to draw attention to an interesting and promising interaction of two theories. On the one hand, it is the theory of \textbf{pseudo-triangulations} which was useful for implicit solution of thecarpenter's rule problem and proved later to give a nice tool for graph embeddings. On the other hand, it is the theory of hyperbolic virtual polytopes which arose from an old uniqueness conjecture for convex bodies (A. D. Alexandrov's problem): suppose that a constant $C$ separates (non-strictly) everywhere the principal curvature radii of a smooth 3-dimensional convex body $K$. Then $K$ is neces…
In this paper our main result states that there exist exactly three combinatorially distinct centrally-symmetric 12-vertex-triangulations of the product of two 2-spheres with a cyclic symmetry. We also compute the automorphism groups of the triangulations. These instances suggest that there is a triangulation of $S^2 \times S^2$ with 11 vertices -- the minimum number of vertices required.
Unimodular triangulations of lattice polytopes arise in algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, integer programming and, of course, combinatorics. In this article, we review several classes of polytopes that do have unimodular triangulations and constructions that preserve their existence. We include, in particular, the first effective proof of the classical result by Knudsen-Mumford-Waterman stating that every lattice polytope has a dilation that admits a unimodular triangulation. Our proof yields an explicit (although doubly exponential) bound for the dilation factor.
Ordinary polytopes are known as a non-simplicial generalization of the cyclic polytopes. The face vectors of ordinary polytopes are shown to be log-concave.
A dissection of a convex d-polytope is a partition of the polytope into d-simplices whose vertices are among the vertices of the polytope. Triangulations are dissections that have the additional property that the set of all its simplices forms a simplicial complex. The size of a dissection is the number of d-simplices it contains. This paper compares triangulations of maximal size with dissections of maximal size. We also exhibit lower and upper bounds for the size of dissections of a 3-polytope and analyze extremal size triangulations for specific non-simplicial polytopes: prisms, antiprisms,…
The hyperdeterminant of format 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 is a polynomial of degree 24 in 16 unknowns which has 2894276 terms. We compute the Newton polytope of this polynomial and the secondary polytope of the 4-cube. The 87959448 regular triangulations of the 4-cube are classified into 25448 D-equivalence classes, one for each vertex of the Newton polytope. The 4-cube has 80876 coarsest regular subdivisions, one for each facet of the secondary polytope, but only 268 of them come from the hyperdeterminant.
Some basic mathematical tools such as convex sets, polytopes and combinatorial topology, are used quite heavily in applied fields such as geometric modeling, meshing, computer vision, medical imaging and robotics. This report may be viewed as a tutorial and a set of notes on convex sets, polytopes, polyhedra, combinatorial topology, Voronoi Diagrams and Delaunay Triangulations. It is intended for a broad audience of mathematically inclined readers. I have included a rather thorough treatment of the equivalence of V-polytopes and H-polytopes and also of the equivalence of V-polyhedra and H-poly…
Cyclic polytopes are generally known for being involved in the Upper Bound Theorem, but they have another extremal property which is less well known. Namely, the special shape of their f-vectors makes them applicable to certain constructions to present non-unimodal convex polytopes. Nevertheless, the f-vectors of cyclic polytopes themselves are unimodal.
Cyclic polytopes are characterized as simplicial polytopes satisfying Gale's evenness condition (a combinatorial condition on facets relative to a fixed ordering of the vertices). Periodically-cyclic polytopes are polytopes for which certain subpolytopes are cyclic. Bisztriczky discovered a class of periodically-cyclic polytopes that also satisfy Gale's evenness condition. The faces of these polytopes are braxtopes, a certain class of nonsimplicial polytopes studied by the authors. In this paper we prove that the periodically-cyclic Gale polytopes of Bisztriczky are exactly the polytopes that …
Ordinary polytopes were introduced by Bisztriczky as a (nonsimplicial) generalization of cyclic polytopes. We show that the colex order of facets of the ordinary polytope is a shelling order. This shelling shares many nice properties with the shellings of simplicial polytopes. We also give a shallow triangulation of the ordinary polytope, and show how the shelling and the triangulation are used to compute the toric h-vector of the ordinary polytope. As one consequence, we get that the contribution from each shelling component to the h-vector is nonnegative. Another consequence is a combinatori…
We study the root polytope $\mathcal P_Φ$ of a finite irreducible crystallographic root system $Φ$ using its relation with the abelian ideals of a Borel subalgebra of a simple Lie algebra with root system $Φ$. We determine the hyperplane arrangement corresponding to the faces of codimension 2 of $\mathcal P_Φ$ and analyze its relation with the facets of $\mathcal P_Φ$. For $Φ$ of type $A_n$ or $C_n$, we show that the orbits of some special subsets of abelian ideals under the action of the Weyl group parametrize a triangulation of $\mathcal P_Φ$. We show that this triangulation restricts to a t…
We present a constructive proof of Alexandrov's theorem regarding the existence of a convex polytope with a given metric on the boundary. The polytope is obtained as a result of a certain deformation in the class of generalized convex polytopes with the given boundary. We study the space of generalized convex polytopes and discover a relation with the weighted Delaunay triangulations of polyhedral surfaces. The existence of the deformation follows from the non-degeneracy of the Hessian of the total scalar curvature of a positively curved generalized convex polytope. The latter is shown to be e…
We introduce the polytope of pointed pseudo-triangulations of a point set in the plane, defined as the polytope of infinitesimal expansive motions of the points subject to certain constraints on the increase of their distances. Its 1-skeleton is the graph whose vertices are the pointed pseudo-triangulations of the point set and whose edges are flips of interior pseudo-triangulation edges. For points in convex position we obtain a new realization of the associahedron, i.e., a geometric representation of the set of triangulations of an n-gon, or of the set of binary trees on n vertices, or of ma…
The Ehrhart polynomial of an integral convex polytope counts the number of lattice points in dilates of the polytope. In math.CO/0402148, the authors conjectured that for any cyclic polytope with integral parameters, the Ehrhart polynomial of it is equal to its volume plus the Ehrhart polynomial of its lower envelope and proved the case when the dimension d = 2. In our article, we prove the conjecture for any dimension.
Every n-edge colored n-regular graph G naturally gives rise to a simple abstract n-polytope, the colorful polytope of G, whose 1-skeleton is isomorphic to G. The paper describes colorful polytope versions of the associahedron and cyclohedron. Like their classical counterparts, the colorful associahedron and cyclohedron encode triangulations and flips, but now with the added feature that the diagonals of the triangulations are colored and adjacency of triangulations requires color preserving flips. The colorful associahedron and cyclohedron are derived as colorful polytopes from the edge colore…
We determine the $166\,104$ extremal monomials of the discriminant of a quaternary cubic form. These are in bijection with $D$-equivalence classes of regular triangulations of the $3$-dilated tetrahedron. We describe how to compute these triangulations and their $D$-equivalence classes in order to arrive at our main result. The computation poses several challenges, such as dealing with the sheer amount of triangulations effectively, as well as devising a suitably fast algorithm for computation of a $D$-equivalence class.
Any totally positive $(k+m)\times n$ matrix induces a map $π_+$ from the positive Grassmannian ${\rm Gr}_+(k,n)$ to the Grassmannian ${\rm Gr}(k,k+m)$, whose image is the amplituhedron $\mathcal{A}_{n,k,m}$ and is endowed with a top-degree form called the canonical form ${\bfΩ}(\mathcal{A}_{n,k,m})$. This construction was introduced by Arkani-Hamed and Trnka, where they showed that ${\bfΩ}(\mathcal{A}_{n,k,4})$ encodes scattering amplitudes in $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills theory. Moreover, the computation of ${\bfΩ}(\mathcal{A}_{n,k,m})$ is reduced to finding the triangulations of $\mathca…
Let $d$ and $n$ be positive integers with $n \geq d + 1$ and $τ_{1}, ..., τ_{n}$ integers with $τ_{1} < ... < τ_{n}$. Let $C_{d}(τ_{1}, ..., τ_{n}) \subset \RR^{d}$ denote the cyclic polytope of dimension $d$ with $n$ vertices $(τ_{1},τ_{1}^{2},...,τ_{1}^{d}), ..., (τ_{n},τ_{n}^{2},...,τ_{n}^{d})$. We are interested in finding the smallest integer $γ_{d}$ such that if $τ_{i+1} - τ_{i} \geq γ_{d}$ for $1 \leq i < n$, then $C_{d}(τ_{1}, ..., τ_{n})$ is normal. One of the known results is $γ_{d} \leq d (d + 1)$. In the present paper a new inequality $γ_{d} \leq d^{2} - 1$ is proved. Moreover, it …
The type C_n full root polytope is the convex hull in R^n of the origin and the points e_i-e_j, e_i+e_j, 2e_k for 1 <= i < j <= n, k \in [n]. Given a graph G, with edges labeled positive or negative, associate to each edge e of G a vector v(e) which is e_i-e_j if e=(i, j), i < j, is labeled negative and e_i+e_j if it is labeled positive. For such a signed graph G, the associated root polytope P(G) is the intersection of the full root polytope with the cone generated by the vectors v(e), for edges e in G. The reduced forms of a certain monomial m[G] in commuting variables x_{ij}, y_{ij}, z_k un…
There are two related poset structures, the higher Stasheff-Tamari orders, on the set of all triangulations of the cyclic $d$ polytope with $n$ vertices. In this paper it is shown that both of them have the homotopy type of a sphere of dimension $n-d-3$. Moreover, we resolve positively a new special case of the \emph{Generalized Baues Problem}: The Baues poset of all polytopal decompositions of a cyclic polytope of dimension $d \leq 3$ has the homotopy type of a sphere of dimension $n-d-2$.
We introduce several classes of polytopes contained in $[0,1]^n$ and cut out by inequalities involving sums of consecutive coordinates. We show that the normalized volumes of these polytopes enumerate circular extensions of certain partial cyclic orders. Among other things this gives a new point of view on a question popularized by Stanley. We also provide a combinatorial interpretation of the Ehrhart $h^*$-polynomials of some of these polytopes in terms of descents of total cyclic orders. The Euler numbers, the Eulerian numbers and the Narayana numbers appear as special cases.
In the present paper, we consider the problem when the toric ring arising from an integral cyclic polytope is Cohen-Macaulay by discussing Serre's condition and we give a complete characterization when that is Gorenstein. Moreover, we study the normality of the other semigroup ring arising from an integral cyclic polytope but generated only with its vertices.