A combinatorial polytope $P$ is said to be projectively unique if it has a single realization up to projective transformations. Projective uniqueness is a geometrically compelling property but is difficult to verify. In this paper, we merge two approaches to projective uniqueness in the literature. One is primarily geometric and is due to McMullen, who showed that certain natural operations on polytopes preserve projective uniqueness. The other is more algebraic and is due to Gouveia, Macchia, Thomas, and Wiebe. They use certain ideals associated to a polytope to verify a property called graphicality that implies projective uniqueness. In this paper, we show that that McMullen's operations preserve not only projective uniquness but also graphicality. As an application, we show that large families of order polytopes are graphic and thus projectively unique.
We prove the following theorem, which is related to McMullen's problem on projective transformations of polytopes; let $2\leq k\leq \lfloor{\frac{d}{2}}\rfloor$ and $ν{(d, k)}$ be the largest number such that any set of $ν{(d,k)}$ points lying in general position in $\mathbb{R}^d$ can be mapped by a permissible projective transformation onto the vertices of a k-neighborly polytope, then $d + \left\lceil{\frac{d}{k}}\right\rceil +1 \leq ν{(d, k)} < 2d-k +1$.
This article announces the completion of the classification of rank 4 locally projective polytopes and their quotients. There are seventeen universal locally projective polytopes (nine nondegenerate). Amongst their 441 quotients are a further four (nonuniversal) regular polytopes, and 152 nonregular but section regular polytopes. All 156 of the latter have hemidodecahedral facets or hemi-icosahedral vertex figures. It is noted that, remarkably, every rank 4 locally projective section regular polytope is finite. The article gives a survey of the literature of locally projective polytopes and th…
We prove that every polytope described by algebraic coordinates is the face of a projectively unique polytope. This provides a universality property for projectively unique polytopes. Using a closely related result of Below, we construct a combinatorial type of 5-dimensional polytope that is not realizable as a subpolytope of any stacked polytope. This disproves a classical conjecture in polytope theory, first formulated by Shephard in the seventies.
Let $X$ be a configuration of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$. What is the maximum number of vertices that $conv(T(X))$ can have among all the possible permissible projective transformations $T$? In this paper, we investigate this and connected questions. After presenting several upper bounds, we study a closely related problem (via Gale transforms) concerning the number of minimal Radon partitions of a set of points. We then present some bounds for this number that enable us to partially answer a question due to Pach and Szegedy. We also discuss another related problem concerning the size of top…
This article exhibits a 4-dimensional combinatorial polytope that has no antiprism, answering a question posed by Bernt Lindstöm. As a consequence, any realization of this combinatorial polytope has a face that it cannot rest upon without toppling over. To this end, we provide a general method for solving a broad class of realizability problems. Specifically, we show that for any semialgebraic property that faces inherit, the given property holds for some realization of every combinatorial polytope if and only if the property holds from some projective copy of every polytope. The proof uses th…
This article examines the universal polytope $\CP$ (of type $\{5,3,5\}$) whose facets are dodecahedra, and whose vertex figures are hemi-icosahedra. The polytope is proven to be finite, and the structure of its group is identified. This information is used to classifiy the quotients of the polytope. A total of 145 quotients are found, including 69 section regular polytopes with the same facets and vertex figures as $\CP$.
We construct an infinite family of 4-polytopes whose realization spaces have dimension smaller or equal to 96. This in particular settles a problem going back to Legendre and Steinitz: whether and how the dimension of the realization space of a polytope is determined/bounded by its f-vector. From this, we derive an infinite family of combinatorially distinct 69-dimensional polytopes whose realization is unique up to projective transformation. This answers a problem posed by Perles and Shephard in the sixties. Moreover, our methods naturally lead to several interesting classes of projectively u…
In this paper, we give an example of a chiral 4-polytope in projective 3-space. This example naturally yields a finite chiral 4-polytope in Euclidean 4-space, giving a counterexample to Theorem 11.2 of [2].
The slack ideal of a polytope is a saturated determinantal ideal that gives rise to a new model for the realization space of the polytope. The simplest slack ideals are toric and have connections to projectively unique polytopes. We prove that if a projectively unique polytope has a toric slack ideal, then it is the toric ideal of the bipartite graph of vertex-facet non-incidences of the polytope. The slack ideal of a polytope is contained in this toric ideal if and only if the polytope is morally 2-level, a generalization of the 2-level property in polytopes. We show that polytopes that do no…
It is already known that the automorphism group of a chiral polyhedron is never isomorphic to $PSL(2,q)$ or $PGL(2,q)$ for any prime power $q$. In this paper, we show that $PSL(2,q)$ and $PGL(2,q)$ are never automorphism groups of chiral polytopes of rank at least $5$. Moreover, we show that $PGL(2,q)$ is the automorphism group of at least one chiral polytope of rank $4$ for every $q\geq5$. Finally, we determine for which values of $q$ the group $PSL(2,q)$ is the automorphism group of a chiral polytope of rank $4$, except when $q=p^d\equiv3\pmod{4}$ where $d>1$ is not a prime power, in which c…
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…
We show that any smooth lattice polytope P with codegree greater or equal than (dim(P)+3)/2 (or equivalently, with degree smaller than dim(P)/2), defines a dual defective projective toric manifold. This implies that P is Q-normal (in the terminology of a recent paper by Di Rocco, Piene and the first author) and answers partially an adjunction-theoretic conjecture by Beltrametti and Sommese. Also, it follows that smooth lattice polytopes with this property are precisely strict Cayley polytopes, which completes the answer of a question of Batyrev and the second author in the nonsingular case.
We classify projective toric manifolds whose dual variety is not a hypersurface in the dual projective space. Under the standard dictionary between toric geometry and convex geometry, they correspond to certain convex Delzant integer polytopes, P, which we call defect polytopes. Using the geometrical classification we give a detailed description of defect polytopes and prove that they are characterized by the vanishing of a combinatorial invariant, denoted by c(P). We further prove that a related invariant, c*(P), is nonnegative, for any simple convex integral polytope.
An outstanding folklore conjecture asserts that, for any prime $p$, up to isomorphism the projective plane $PG(2,\mathbb{F}_p)$ over the field $\mathbb{F}_p := \mathbb{Z}/p\mathbb{Z}$ is the unique projective plane of order $p$. Let $π$ be any projective plane of order $p$. For any partial linear space ${\cal X}$, define the inclusion number $i({\cal X},π)$ to be the number of isomorphic copies of ${\cal X}$ in $π$. In this paper we prove that if ${\cal X}$ has at most $\log_2 p$ lines, then $i({\cal X},π)$ can be written as an explicit rational linear combination (depending only on ${\cal X}$…
Polyptych lattices and marked chain-order polytopes
Faculty of Advanced Science and Technology, Kumamoto University（熊本大学先进科学技术学部）；Department of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University（大阪大学信息理工学研究科纯应用数学系）
A clutter is \emph{clean} if it has no delta or the blocker of an extended odd hole minor, and it is \emph{tangled} if its covering number is two and every element appears in a minimum cover. Clean tangled clutters have been instrumental in progress towards several open problems on ideal clutters, including the $τ=2$ Conjecture. Let $\mathcal{C}$ be a clean tangled clutter. It was recently proved that $\mathcal{C}$ has a fractional packing of value two. Collecting the supports of all such fractional packings, we obtain what is called the {\it core} of $\mathcal{C}$. The core is a duplication o…
We show that there is a unique hypersurface of minimal degree passing through the non-faces of a polytope which is defined by a simple hyperplane arrangement. This generalizes the construction of the adjoint curve of a polygon by Wachspress in 1975. The defining polynomial of our adjoint hypersurface is the adjoint polynomial introduced by Warren in 1996. This is a key ingredient for the definition of Wachspress coordinates, which are barycentric coordinates on an arbitrary convex polytope. The adjoint polynomial also appears both in algebraic statistics, when studying the moments of uniform p…
Chow stability is one notion of Mumford's Geometric Invariant Theory for studying the moduli space of polarized varieties. Kapranov, Sturmfels and Zelevinsky detected that Chow stability of polarized toric varieties is determined by its inherent {\it secondary polytope}, which is a polytope whose vertices correspond to regular triangulations of the associated polytope \cite{KSZ}. In this paper, we give a purely convex-geometrical proof that the Chow form of a projective toric variety is $H$-semistable if and only if it is $H$-polystable with respect to the standard complex torus action $H$. Th…
We present a formula for the degree of the discriminant of a smooth projective toric variety associated to a lattice polytope P, in terms of the number of integral points in the interior of dilates of faces of dimension greater or equal than $\lceil \frac {\dim P} 2 \rceil$.
We study a family of posets and the associated chain and order polytopes. We identify the order polytope as a maximal Kogan face in a Gelfand-Tsetlin polytope of a multiple of a fundamental weight. We show that the character of such a Kogan face equals to the character of a Demazure module which occurs in the irreducible representation of $\mathfrak{sl}_n$ having highest weight multiple of fundamental weight and for any such Demazure module there exists a corresponding poset and associated maximal Kogan face. We prove that the chain polytope parametrizes a monomial basis of the associated PBW-…
We apply an improvement of the Delsarte LP-bound to give a new proof of the non-existence of finite projective planes of order 6, and uniqueness of finite projective planes of order 7. The proof is computer aided, and it is also feasible to apply to higher orders like 8, 9 and, with further improvements, possibly 10 and 12.
For a given lattice polytope, two fundamental problems within the field of Ehrhart theory are to (1) determine if its (Ehrhart) $h^\ast$-polynomial is unimodal and (2) to determine if its Ehrhart polynomial has only positive coefficients. The former property of a lattice polytope is known as Ehrhart unimodality and the latter property is known as Ehrhart positivity. These two properties are often simultaneously conjectured to hold for interesting families of lattice polytopes, yet they are typically studied in parallel. As to answer a question posed at the 2017 Introductory Workshop to the MSR…
Marked chain-order polytopes are convex polytopes constructed from a marked poset, which give a discrete family relating a marked order polytope with a marked chain polytope. In this paper, we consider the Gelfand-Tsetlin poset of type A, and realize the associated marked chain-order polytopes as Newton-Okounkov bodies of the flag variety. Our realization connects previous realizations of Gelfand-Tsetlin polytopes and Feigin-Fourier-Littelmann-Vinberg polytopes as Newton-Okounkov bodies in a uniform way. As an application, we prove that the flag variety degenerates into the irreducible normal …
Let $K[\mathcal{O}(P)]$ denote the toric ring of the order polytope $\mathcal{O}(P)$ of a finite partially ordered set $P$ and $K[\mathcal{C}(P)]$ that of the chain polytope $\mathcal{C}(P)$. It will be shown that $β_{p, p+j}(K[\mathcal{O}(P)]) = β_{p, p+j}(K[\mathcal{C}(P)])$ for all $j \geq 0$, where $p$ is the projective dimension of $K[\mathcal{O}(P)]$ (and that of $K[\mathcal{C}(P)]$). In particular, $K[\mathcal{O}(P)]$ is level if and only if $K[\mathcal{C}(P)]$ is level.
Reflexive lattice polytopes play a key role in combinatorics, algebraic geometry, physics, and other areas. One important class of lattice polytopes are lattice simplices defining weighted projective spaces. We investigate the question of when a reflexive weighted projective space simplex has the integer decomposition property. We provide a complete classification of reflexive weighted projective space simplices having the integer decomposition property for the case when there are at most three distinct non-unit weights, and conjecture a general classification for an arbitrary number of distin…
These notes are based on three lectures given at the 2013 CIME/CIRM summer school. The purpose of this series of lectures is to introduce the notion of a toric fibration and to give its geometrical and combinatorial characterizations. Polarized toric varieties which are birationally equivalent to projective toric bundles are associated to a class of polytopes called Cayley polytopes. Their geometry and combinatorics have a fruitful interplay leading to fundamental insight in both directions. These notes will illustrate geometrical phenomena, in algebraic geometry and neighboring fields, which …
In 1971, McMullen and Walkup posed the following conjecture, which is called the generalized lower bound conjecture: If $P$ is a simplicial $d$-polytope then its $h$-vector $(h_0,h_1,...,h_d)$ satisfies $h_0 \leq h_1 \leq ... \leq h_{\lfloor \frac d 2 \rfloor}$. Moreover, if $h_{r-1}=h_r$ for some $r \leq \frac d 2$ then $P$ can be triangulated without introducing simplices of dimension $\leq d-r$. The first part of the conjecture was solved by Stanley in 1980 using the hard Lefschetz theorem for projective toric varieties. In this paper, we give a proof of the remaining part of the conjecture…
Ehrhart's conjecture proposes a sharp upper bound on the volume of a convex body whose barycenter is its only interior lattice point. Recently, Berman and Berndtsson proved this conjecture for a class of rational polytopes including reflexive polytopes. In particular, they showed that the complex projective space has the maximal anticanonical degree among all toric Kaehler-Einstein Fano manifolds. In this note, we prove that projective space is the only such toric manifold with maximal degree by proving its corresponding convex-geometric statement. We also discuss a generalized version of Ehrh…
