30 pages, to appear in: ``British Combinatorial Surveys'' (C. D. Wensley, ed.), Cambridge University Press, 2003. This is an updated version containing minor changes suggested by the referee
We discuss the problem to count, or, more modestly, to estimate the number f(m,n) of unimodular triangulations of the planar grid of size $m\times n$.
Among other tools, we employ recursions that allow one to compute the (huge) number of triangulations for small m and rather large n by dynamic programming; we show that this computation can be done in polynomial time if m is fixed, and present computational results from our implementation of this approach.
We also present new upper and lower bounds for large m and n, and we report about results obtained from a computer simulation of the random walk that is generated by flips.
After defining convex near-polygons, a formula enumerating the number of triangulations of such configurations is derived in terms of edge-polynomials. The paper describes also a transfer-matrix approach for computing quantities related to triangulations.
We consider lattice walks in the plane starting at the origin, remaining in the first quadrant and made of West, South and North-East steps. In 1965, Germain Kreweras discovered a remarkably simple formula giving the number of these walks (with prescribed length and endpoint). Kreweras' proof was very involved and several alternative derivations have been proposed since then. But the elegant simplicity of the counting formula remained unexplained. We give the first purely combinatorial explanation of this formula. Our approach is based on a bijection between Kreweras walks and triangulations w…
Hakimi, Schmeichel, and Thomassen in 1979 conjectured that every $4$-connected planar triangulation $G$ on $n$ vertices has at least $2(n-2)(n-4)$ Hamiltonian cycles, with equality if and only if $G$ is a double wheel. In this paper, we show that every $4$-connected planar triangulation on $n$ vertices has $Ω(n^2)$ Hamiltonian cycles. Moreover, we show that if $G$ is a $4$-connected planar triangulation on $n$ vertices and the distance between any two vertices of degree $4$ in $G$ is at least $3$, then $G$ has $2^{Ω(n^{1/4})}$ Hamiltonian cycles.
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig（莱比锡马克斯·普朗克科学计量学研究所）；University of Bayreuth（拜罗伊特大学）
We compute the number of triangulations of a convex $k$-gon each of whose sides is subdivided by $r-1$ points. We find explicit formulas and generating functions, and we determine the asymptotic behaviour of these numbers as $k$ and/or $r$ tend to infinity. We connect these results with the question of finding the planar set of points in general position that has the minimum possible number of triangulations - a well-known open problem from computational geometry.
A {\em $1-$vertex triangulation} of an oriented compact surface $S$ of genus $g$ is an embedded graph $T\subset S$ with a unique vertex such that all connected components of $S\setminus T$ are triangles (adjacent to exactly 3 edges of $T$). This paper gives formulas enumerating such triangulations (up to equivalence) on an oriented surface of given genus. {\em Une triangulation à un sommet} d'une surface orientée compacte $S$ de genre $g$ est un graphe $T\subset S$ qui a un unique sommet et dont toutes les faces (composantes connexes de $S\setminus T$) sont des triangles (incidentes à trois ar…
Let $P\subset\mathbb{R}^{2}$ be a set of $n$ points. In this paper we show two new algorithms, one to compute the number of triangulations of $P$, and one to compute the number of pseudo-triangulations of $P$. We show that our algorithms run in time $O^{*}(t(P))$ and $O^{*}(pt(P))$ respectively, where $t(P)$ and $pt(P)$ are the largest number of triangulation paths (T-paths) and pseudo-triangulations paths (PT-paths), respectively, that the algorithms encounter during their execution. Moreover, we show that $t(P) = O^{*}(9^{n})$, which is the first non-trivial bound on $t(P)$ to be known. Whil…
We prove an exponential upper bound for the number $f(m,n)$ of all maximal triangulations of the $m\times n$ grid: \[ f(m,n) < 2^{3mn}. \] In particular, this improves a result of S. Yu. Orevkov (1999).
Given a set of $n$ points $S$ in the plane, a triangulation $T$ of $S$ is a maximal set of non-crossing segments with endpoints in $S$. We present an algorithm that computes the number of triangulations on a given set of $n$ points in time $n^{(11+ o(1))\sqrt{n} }$, significantly improving the previous best running time of $O(2^n n^2)$ by Alvarez and Seidel [SoCG 2013]. Our main tool is identifying separators of size $O(\sqrt{n})$ of a triangulation in a canonical way. The definition of the separators are based on the decomposition of the triangulation into nested layers ("cactus graphs"). Bas…
Let $P$ be a set of $n$ points in the plane. A crossing-free structure on $P$ is a plane graph with vertex set $P$. Examples of crossing-free structures include triangulations of $P$, spanning cycles of $P$, also known as polygonalizations of $P$, among others. In this paper we develop a general technique for computing the number of crossing-free structures of an input set $P$. We apply the technique to obtain algorithms for computing the number of triangulations, matchings, and spanning cycles of $P$. The running time of our algorithms is upper bounded by $n^{O(k)}$, where $k$ is the number o…
In this paper, we prove that the set of triangulations of a polygon can be equipped with an order to become a lattice. First, we define this order. In [HN99], authors defined the flip operator and then prove some properties of the graph of triangulations. We use their theorems and extend them to construct the lattice of triangulations. We prove this lattice property and introduce an elegant algorithm which correctness is induced from the proof. The complexity of this algorithm will be considered. This algorithm is efficient to find the infimum of a pair of triangulations.
Counting Euclidean triangulations with vertices in a finite set $\C$ of the convex hull $\conv(\C)$ of $\C$ is difficult in general, both algorithmically and theoretically. The aim of this paper is to describe nearly convex polygons, a class of configurations for which this problem can be solved to some extent. Loosely speaking, a nearly convex polygon is an infinitesimal perturbation of a weakly convex polygon (a convex polygon with edges subdivided by additional points). Our main result shows that the triangulation polynomial, enumerating all triangulations of a nearly convex polygon, is def…
Three--dimensional colored triangulations are gluings of tetrahedra whose faces carry the colors 0, 1, 2, 3 and in which the attaching maps between tetrahedra are defined using the colors. This framework makes it possible to generalize the notion of two--dimensional $2p$--angulations to three dimensions in a way which is suitable for combinatorics and enumeration. In particular, universality classes of three--dimensional triangulations can be investigated within this framework. Here we study colored triangulations obtained by gluing octahedra. Those which maximize the number of edges at fixed …
The Stanley lattice, Tamari lattice and Kreweras lattice are three remarkable orders defined on the set of Catalan objects of a given size. These lattices are ordered by inclusion: the Stanley lattice is an extension of the Tamari lattice which is an extension of the Kreweras lattice. The Stanley order can be defined on the set of Dyck paths of size $n$ as the relation of \emph{being above}. Hence, intervals in the Stanley lattice are pairs of non-crossing Dyck paths. In a former article, the second author defined a bijection $Φ$ between pairs of non-crossing Dyck paths and the realizers of tr…
We express the generating function for lattice points in a rational polyhedral cone with a simplicial subdivision in terms of multivariate analogues of the h-polynomials of the subdivision and "local contributions" of the links of its nonunimodular faces. We also compute new examples of nonunimodal h^*-vectors of reflexive polytopes.
We show that no minimal vertex triangulation of a closed, connected, orientable 2-manifold of genus 6 admits a polyhedral embedding in R^3. We also provide examples of minimal vertex triangulations of closed, connected, orientable 2-manifolds of genus 5 that do not admit any polyhedral embeddings. We construct a new infinite family of non-realizable triangulations of surfaces. These results were achieved by transforming the problem of finding suitable oriented matroids into a satisfiability problem. This method can be applied to other geometric realizability problems, e.g. for face lattices of…
We study random triangulations of the integer points $[0,n]^2 \cap\mathbb{Z}^2$, where each triangulation $σ$ has probability measure $λ^{|σ|}$ with $|σ|$ denoting the sum of the length of the edges in $σ$. Such triangulations are called \emph{lattice triangulations}. We construct a height function on lattice triangulations and prove that, in the whole subcritical regime $λ<1$, the function behaves as a \emph{Lyapunov function} with respect to Glauber dynamics; that is, the function is a supermartingale. We show the applicability of the above result by establishing several features of lattice …
We consider random lattice triangulations of $n\times k$ rectangular regions with weight $λ^{|σ|}$ where $λ>0$ is a parameter and $|σ|$ denotes the total edge length of the triangulation. When $λ\in(0,1)$ and $k$ is fixed, we prove a tight upper bound of order $n^2$ for the mixing time of the edge-flip Glauber dynamics. Combined with the previously known lower bound of order $\exp(Ω(n^2))$ for $λ>1$ [3], this establishes the existence of a dynamical phase transition for thin rectangles with critical point at $λ=1$.
We provide a complete description of important geometric invariants of the Laplacian lattice of a multigraph under the distance function induced by a regular simplex, namely Voronoi Diagram, Delaunay Triangulation, Delaunay Polytope and its combinatorial structure, Shortest Vectors, Covering and Packing Radius. We use this information to obtain the following results: i. Every multigraph defines a Delaunay triangulation of its Laplacian lattice and this Delaunay triangulation contains complete information of the multigraph up to isomorphism. ii. The number of multigraphs with a given Laplacian …
The paper concerns lattice triangulations, that is, triangulations of the integer points in a polygon in $\mathbb{R}^2$ whose vertices are also integer points. Lattice triangulations have been studied extensively both as geometric objects in their own right and by virtue of applications in algebraic geometry. Our focus is on random triangulations in which a triangulation $σ$ has weight $λ^{|σ|}$, where $λ$ is a positive real parameter, and $|σ|$ is the total length of the edges in $σ$. Empirically, this model exhibits a "phase transition" at $λ=1$ (corresponding to the uniform distribution): f…
Transversal structures (also known as regular edge labelings) are combinatorial structures defined over 4-connected plane triangulations with quadrangular outer-face. They have been intensively studied and used for many applications (drawing algorithm, random generation, enumeration ...). In this paper we introduce and study a generalization of these objects for the toroidal case. Contrary to what happens in the plane, the set of toroidal transversal structures of a given toroidal triangulation is partitioned into several distributive lattices. We exhibit a subset of toroidal transversal struc…
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.
Lovász and Plummer conjectured, in the mid 1970's, that every cubic graph G with no cutedge has an exponential in |V(G)| number of perfect matchings. In this work we show that every cubic planar graph G whose geometric dual graph is a stack triangulation has at least 3 times the golden ratio to |V(G)|/72 distinct perfect matchings. Our work builds on a novel approach relating Lovász and Plummer's conjecture and the number of so called groundstates of the widely studied Ising model from statistical physics.
We present a unifying framework in which both the $ν$-Tamari lattice, introduced by Préville-Ratelle and Viennot, and principal order ideals in Young's lattice indexed by lattice paths $ν$, are realized as the dual graphs of two combinatorially striking triangulations of a family of flow polytopes which we call the $ν$-caracol flow polytopes. The first triangulation gives a new geometric realization of the $ν$-Tamari complex introduced by Ceballos, Padrol and Sarmiento. We use the second triangulation to show that the $h^*$-vector of the $ν$-caracol flow polytope is given by the $ν$-Narayana n…
For each integer partition $\mathbf{q}$ with $d$ parts, we denote by $Δ_{(1,\mathbf{q})}$ the lattice simplex obtained as the convex hull in $\mathbb{R}^d$ of the standard basis vectors along with the vector $-\mathbf{q}$. For $\mathbf{q}$ with two distinct parts such that $Δ_{(1,\mathbf{q})}$ is reflexive and has the integer decomposition property, we establish a characterization of the lattice points contained in $Δ_{(1,\mathbf{q})}$. We then construct a Gröbner basis with a squarefree initial ideal of the toric ideal defined by these simplices. This establishes the existence of a regular un…
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…
Regular triangulations of products of lattice polytopes are constructed with the additional property that the dual graphs of the triangulations are bipartite. The (weighted) size difference of this bipartition is a lower bound for the number of real roots of certain sparse polynomial systems by recent results of Soprunova and Sottile [Adv. Math. 204(1):116-151, 2006]. Special attention is paid to the cube case.
We describe Maple packages for the automatic generation of generating functions(and series expansions) for counting lattice animals(fixed polyominoes), in the two-dimensional hexagonal lattice, of bounded but arbitrary width. Our Maple packages(complete with source code) are easy-to-use and available from my website.
Bimonotone subdivisions in two dimensions are subdivisions all of whose sides are either vertical or have nonnegative slope. They correspond to statistical estimates of probability distributions of strongly positively dependent random variables. The number of bimonotone subdivisions compared to the total number of subdivisions of a point configuration provides insight into how often the random variables are positively dependent. We give recursions as well as formulas for the numbers of bimonotone and total subdivisions of $2\times n$ grid configurations in the plane. Furthermore, we connect th…
Given a lattice polytope $P$ (with underlying lattice $\lo$), the universal counting function $\uu_P(\lo')=|P\cap \lo'|$ is defined on all lattices $\lo'$ containing $\lo$. Motivated by questions concerning lattice polytopes and the Ehrhart polynomial, we study the equation $\uu_P=\uu_Q$.
We present a direct bijection between planar 3-connected triangulations and bridgeless planar maps, which were first enumerated by Tutte (1962) and Walsh and Lehman (1975) respectively. Previously known bijections by Wormald (1980) and Fusy (2010) are all defined recursively. Our direct bijection passes by a new class of combinatorial objects called "sticky trees". We also present bijections between sticky trees, intervals in the Tamari lattices and closed flows on forests. With our bijections, we recover several known enumerative results about these objects. We thus show that sticky trees can…
We recover the Tutte polynomial of a matroid, up to change of coordinates, from an Ehrhart-style polynomial counting lattice points in the Minkowski sum of its base polytope and scalings of simplices. Our polynomial has coefficients of alternating sign with a combinatorial interpretation closely tied to the Dawson partition. Our definition extends in a straightforward way to polymatroids, and in this setting our polynomial has Kálmán's internal and external activity polynomials as its univariate specialisations.
For every finite Coxeter group W , we prove that the number of chains in the shard intersection lattice introduced by Reading on the one hand and in the BHZ poset introduced by Bergeron, Zabrocki and the third author on the other hand, are the same. We also show that these two partial orders are related by an equality between generating series for their M{ö}bius numbers, and provide a dimension-preserving bijection between the order complex on the BHZ poset and the pulling triangulation of the permutahedron arising from the right weak order, analogous to the bijection defined by Reading betwee…
We count a large class of lattice paths by using factorizations of free monoids. Besides the classical lattice paths counting problems related to Catalan numbers, we give a new approach to the problem of counting walks on the slit plane (walks avoid a half line) that was first solved by Bousquet-Mélou and Schaeffer. We also solve a problem about walks in the half plane avoiding a half line by subsequently applying the factorizations of two different Gessel pairs, giving a generalization of a result of Bousquet-Mélou.
Formulas are derived for counting walks in the Kronecker product of graphs, and the associated spectral distributions are obtained by the Mellin convolution of probability distributions. Two-dimensional restricted lattices admitting the Kronecker product structure are listed, and their spectral distributions are calculated in terms of elliptic integrals.
We develop an algorithm for efficiently computing recursively defined functions on posets. We illustrate this algorithm by disproving conjectures about the game Subset Takeaway (Chomp on a hypercube) and computing the number of linear extensions of the lattice of a 7-cube and related lattices.
We derive improved upper bounds on the number of crossing-free straight-edge spanning cycles (also known as Hamiltonian tours and simple polygonizations) that can be embedded over any specific set of $N$ points in the plane. More specifically, we bound the ratio between the number of spanning cycles (or perfect matchings) that can be embedded over a point set and the number of triangulations that can be embedded over it. The respective bounds are $O(1.8181^N)$ for cycles and $O(1.1067^N)$ for matchings. These imply a new upper bound of $O(54.543^N)$ on the number of crossing-free straight-edge…
We obtain a growth estimate for the number of lattice points inside any Q-Gorenstein cone. Our proof uses the result of Futaki-Ono-Wang on Sasaki-Einstein metric for the toric Sasakian manifold associated to the cone, a Yau's inequality, and the Kawasaki-Riemann-Roch formula for orbifolds.
We study the rich structure of periodic stationary solutions of Nagumo reaction diffusion equation on lattices. By exploring the relationship with Nagumo equations on cyclic graphs we are able to divide these periodic solutions into equivalence classes that can be partially ordered and counted. In order to accomplish this, we use combinatorial concepts such as necklaces, bracelets and Lyndon words.
We address the problem of counting walks by winding angle on the Kreweras lattice, an oriented version of the triangular lattice. Our method uses a new decomposition of the lattice, which allows us to write functional equations characterising a generating function of walks counted by length, endpoint and winding angle. We then solve these functional equations in terms of Jacobi theta functions. By using this result in conjunction with the reflection principle, we count walks confined to a cone of opening angle any multiple of $\fracπ{3}$, allowing us to extract asymptotic and algebraic informa…
