We provide a number of new construction techniques for cubical complexes and cubical polytopes, and thus for cubifications (hexahedral mesh generation). As an application we obtain an instance of a cubical 4-polytope that has a non-orientable dual manifold (a Klein bottle). This confirms an existence conjecture of Hetyei (1995).
More systematically, we prove that every normal crossing codimension one immersion of a compact 2-manifold into R^3 PL-equivalent to a dual manifold immersion of a cubical 4-polytope. As an instance we obtain a cubical 4-polytope with a cubation of Boy's surface as a dual manifold immersion, and with an odd number of facets. Our explicit example has 17 718 vertices and 16 533 facets. Thus we get a parity changing operation for 3-dimensional cubical complexes (hexa meshes); this solves problems of Eppstein, Thurston, and others.
Although the Unimodality Conjecture holds for some certain classes of cubical polytopes (e.g. cubes, capped cubical polytopes, neighborly cubical polytopes), it fails for cubical polytopes in general. A 12-dimensional cubical polytope with non-unimodal face vector is constructed by using capping operations over a neighborly cubical polytope with 2 to the power 131 vertices. For cubical polytopes, the Unimodality Conjecture is proved for dimensions less than 11. The first one-third of the face vector of a cubical polytope is increasing and its last one-third is decreasing in any dimension.
Neighborly cubical polytopes are known as the cubical analogues of the cyclic polytopes. Using the short cubical $h$-vectors of cubical polytopes (introduced by Adin), we derive an explicit formula for the face numbers of the neighborly cubical polytopes. These face numbers form a unimodal sequence.
What is the minimal closed cone containing all $f$-vectors of cubical $d$-polytopes? We construct cubical polytopes showing that this cone, expressed in the cubical $g$-vector coordinates, contains the nonnegative $g$-orthant, thus verifying one direction of the Cubical Generalized Lower Bound Conjecture of Babson, Billera and Chan. Our polytopes also show that a natural cubical analogue of the simplicial Generalized Lower Bound Theorem does not hold.
We prove that the neighborly cubical polytopes studied by G"unter M. Ziegler and the first author arise as a special case of neighborly cubical spheres constructed by Babson, Billera, and Chan. By relating the two constructions we obtain an explicit description of a non-polytopal neighborly cubical sphere and, further, a new proof of the fact that the cubical equivelar surfaces of McMullen, Schulz, and Wills can be embedded into R^3.
A cubical polytope is a polytope with all its facets being combinatorially equivalent to cubes. We deal with the connectivity of the graphs of cubical polytopes. We first establish that, for any $d\ge 3$, the graph of a cubical $d$-polytope with minimum degree $δ$ is $\min\{δ,2d-2\}$-connected. Second, we show, for any $d\ge 4$, that every minimum separator of cardinality at most $2d-3$ in such a graph consists of all the neighbours of some vertex and that removing the vertices of the separator from the graph leaves exactly two components, with one of them being the vertex itself.
Neighborly cubical polytopes exist: for any $n\ge d\ge 2r+2$, there is a cubical convex d-polytope $C^n_d$ whose $r$-skeleton is combinatorially equivalent to that of the $n$-dimensional cube. This solves a problem of Babson, Billera & Chan. Kalai conjectured that the boundary $\partial C^n_d$ of a neighborly cubical polytope $C^n_d$ maximizes the $f$-vector among all cubical $(d-1)$-spheres with $2^n$ vertices. While we show that this is true for polytopal spheres for $n\le d+1$, we also give a counter-example for $d=4$ and $n=6$. Further, the existence of neighborly cubical polytopes shows t…
A cubical polytope is a polytope with all its facets being combinatorially equivalent to cubes. The paper is concerned with the linkedness of the graphs of cubical polytopes. A graph with at least $2k$ vertices is $k$-linked if, for every set of $2k$ distinct vertices organised in arbitrary $k$ pairs of vertices, there are $k$ vertex-disjoint paths joining the vertices in the pairs. Larman and Mani in 1970 proved that simplicial $d$-polytopes, polytopes with all their facets being combinatorially equivalent to simplices, are $\floor{(d+1)/2}$-linked; this is the maximum possible linkedness giv…
In this paper we show that graphs of "neighbourly" cubical complexes -- cubical complexes in which every pair of vertices spans a (unique) cube -- have good expansion properties, using a technique based on multicommodity flows. By showing that graphs of stable set polytopes are graphs of neighbourly cubical complexes we give a new proof that graphs of stable set polytopes have edge expansion 1.
Several recent papers have addressed the problem of characterizing the $f$-vectors of cubical polytopes. This is largely motivated by the complete characterization of the $f$-vectors of simplicial polytopes given by Stanley, Billera, and Lee in 1980. Along these lines Blind and Blind have shown that unlike in the simplicial case, there are parity restrictions on the $f$-vectors of cubical polytopes. In particular, except for polygons, all even dimensional cubical polytopes must have an even number of vertices. Here this result is extended to a class of zonotopal complexes which includes simply…
Through tropical normal idempotent matrices, we introduce isocanted alcoved polytopes, computing their $f$--vectors and checking the validity of the following five conjectures: Bárány, unimodality, $3^d$, flag and cubical lower bound (CLBC). Isocanted alcoved polytopes are centrally symmetric, almost simple cubical polytopes. They are zonotopes. We show that, for each dimension, there is a unique combinatorial type. In dimension $d$, an isocanted alcoved polytope has $2^{d+1}-2$ vertices, its face lattice is the lattice of proper subsets of $[d+1]$ and its diameter is $d+1$. They are realizati…
We consider the realization space of the $d$-dimensional cube, and show that any two realizations are connected by a finite sequence of projective transformations and normal transformations. We use this fact to define an analog of the connected sum construction for cubical $d$-polytopes, and apply this construction to certain cubical $d$-polytopes to conclude that the rays spanned by $f$-vectors of cubical $d$-polytopes are dense in Adin's cone. The connectivity result on cubes extends to any product of simplices, and further, it shows the respective realization spaces are contractible.
The $h$-polynomial of the barycentric subdivision of any $n$-dimensional cubical complex with nonnegative cubical $h$-vector is shown to have only real roots and to be interlaced by the Eulerian polynomial of type $B_n$. This result applies to barycentric subdivisions of shellable cubical complexes and, in particular, to barycentric subdivisions of cubical convex polytopes and answers affirmatively a question of Brenti, Mohammadi and Welker.
Brightwell, van den Heuvel and Stougie proved that the diameter of an $m \times n$ transportation polytope is at most $8(m+n-2)$, a factor of eight away from the Hirsch Conjecture. This bound was improved to $3(m+n-1)$ by Hurkens. We investigate diameters for certain classes of transportation polytopes. Note: After the completion of this note, we discovered that the class of transportation polytopes studied in this note was already considered in Michel L. Balinski. On two special classes of transportation polytopes. Math. Programming Stud., 1:43-58, 1974. Michel L. Balinski and Fred J. Rispoli…
We introduce a deformed product construction for simple polytopes in terms of lower-triangular block matrix representations. We further show how Gale duality can be employed for the construction and for the analysis of deformed products such that specified faces (e.g. all the k-faces) are ``strictly preserved'' under projection. Thus, starting from an arbitrary neighborly simplicial (d-2)-polytope Q on n-1 vertices we construct a deformed n-cube, whose projection to the last dcoordinates yields a neighborly cubical d-polytope. As an extension of thecubical case, we construct matrix representat…
A foundation is laid for a theory of combinatorial groupoids, allowing us to use concepts like ``holonomy'', ``parallel transport'', ``bundles'', ``combinatorial curvature'' etc. in the context of simplicial (polyhedral) complexes, posets, graphs, polytopes and other combinatorial objects. A new, holonomy-type invariant for cubical complexes is introduced, leading to a combinatorial ``Theorema Egregium'' for cubical complexes non-embeddable into cubical lattices. Parallel transport of Hom-complexes and maps is used as a tool for extending Babson-Kozlov-Lovasz graph coloring results to more gen…
We show that by cutting off the vertices and then the edges of neighborly cubical polytopes, one obtains simple 4-dimensional polytopes with n vertices such that all separators of the graph have size at least $Ω(n/\log^{3/2}n)$. This disproves a conjecture by Kalai from 1991/2004.
We specify what is meant for a polytope to be reconstructible from its graph or dual graph. And we introduce the problem of class reconstructibility, i.e., the face lattice of the polytope can be determined from the (dual) graph within a given class. We provide examples of cubical polytopes that are not reconstructible from their dual graphs. Furthermore, we show that matroid (base) polytopes are not reconstructible from their graphs and not class reconstructible from their dual graphs; our counterexamples include hypersimplices. Additionally, we prove that matroid polytopes are class reconstr…
The main purpose of this paper is to popularize Danzer's power complex construction and establish some new results about covering maps between two power complexes. Power complexes are cube-like combinatorial structures that share many structural properties with higher-dimensional cubes and cubical tessellations on manifolds. Power complexes that are also abstract polytopes have repeatedly appeared somewhat unexpectedly in various contexts, although often under a different name. However, the non-polytope case is largely unexplored.
The first author showed that for a given point $p$ in an $nk$-polytope $P$ there are $n$ points in the $k$-faces of $P$, whose barycenter is $p$. We show that we can increase the dimension of $P$ by $r$, if we allow $r$ of the points to be in $(k+1)$-faces. While we can force points with a prescribed barycenter into faces of dimensions $k$ and $k+1$, we show that the gap in dimensions of these faces can never exceed one. We also investigate the weighted analogue of this question, where a convex combination with predetermined coefficients of $n$ points in $k$-faces of an $nk$-polytope is suppos…
We study properties of the realizations of groups as the combinatorial automorphism group of a convex polytope. We show that for any non-abelian group $G$ with a central involution there is a centrally symmetric polytope with $G$ as its combinatorial automorphisms. We show that for each integer $n$, there are groups that cannot be realized as the combinatorial automorphisms of convex polytopes of dimension at most $n$. We also give an optimal lower bound for the dimension of the realization of a group as the group of isometries that preserves a convex polytope.
We prove an asymptotic estimate for the number of mxn non-negative integer matrices (contingency tables) with prescribed row and column sums and, more generally, for the number of integer feasible flows in a network. Similarly, we estimate the volume of the polytope of mxn non-negative real matrices with prescribed row and column sums. Our estimates are solutions of convex optimization problems and hence can be computed efficiently. As a corollary, we show that if row sums R=(r_1, ..., r_m) and column sums C=(c_1, ..., c_n) with r_1 + ... + r_m =c_1 + ... +c_n =N are sufficiently far from cons…
The fractional perfect b-matching polytope of an undirected graph G is the polytope of all assignments of nonnegative real numbers to the edges of G such that the sum of the numbers over all edges incident to any vertex v is a prescribed nonnegative number b_v. General theorems which provide conditions for nonemptiness, give a formula for the dimension, and characterize the vertices, edges and face lattices of such polytopes are obtained. Many of these results are expressed in terms of certain spanning subgraphs of G which are associated with subsets or elements of the polytope. For example, i…
The paper surveys some new results and open problems connected with such fundamental combinatorial concepts as polytopes, simplicial complexes, cubical complexes, and subspace arrangements. Particular attention is paid to the case of simplicial and cubical subdivisions of manifolds and, especially, spheres. We describe important constructions which allow to study all these combinatorial objects by means of methods of commutative and homological algebra. The proposed approach to combinatorial problems relies on the theory of moment-angle complexes, currently being developed by the authors. The …
We investigate a version of Viro's method for constructing polynomial systems with many positive solutions, based on regular triangulations of the Newton polytope of the system. The number of positive solutions obtained with our method is governed by the size of the largest positively decorable subcomplex of the triangulation. Here, positive decorability is a property that we introduce and which is dual to being a subcomplex of some regular triangulation. Using this duality, we produce large positively decorable subcomplexes of the boundary complexes of cyclic polytopes. As a byproduct we get …
