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 their quotients, and fills one small gap in the classification in rank 4.
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 $\CP$.
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 graph…
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 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…
We describe a new sequence of polytopes which characterize A_infinity maps from a topological monoid to an A_infinity space. Therefore each of these polytopes is a quotient of the corresponding multiplihedron. Later term(s) in our sequence of polytopes are demonstrated not to be combinatorially equivalent to the associahedron, as was previously assumed. They are given the new collective name composihedra. We point out how these polytopes are used to parameterize compositions in the formulation of the theories of enriched bicategories and pseudomonoids in a monoidal bicategory. We present a sim…
This paper studies two related subjects. One is some combinatorics arising from linear projections of polytopes and fans of cones. The other is quotient varieties of toric varieties. The relation is that projections of polytopes are related to quotients of projective toric varieties and projection of fans are related to quotients of general toric varieties. Despite its relation to geometry the first part is purely combinatorial and should be of interest in its own right.
We present the results of an investigation into the representations of Archimedean polyhedra (those polyhedra containing only one type of vertex figure) as quotients of regular abstract polytopes. Two methods of generating these presentations are discussed, one of which may be applied in a general setting, and another which makes use of a regular polytope with the same automorphism group as the desired quotient. Representations of the 14 sporadic Archimedean polyhedra (including the pseudorhombicuboctahedron) as quotients of regular abstract polyhedra are obtained, and summarised in a table. T…
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…
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…
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].
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.
In this note, we prove that for any finite dimensional vector space $V$ over $\mathbb {C}$, and for a finite cyclic group $G$, the projective variety $\mathbb P(V)/G$ is projectively normal with respect to the descent of $\mathcal O(1)^{\otimes |G|}$ by a method using toric variety, and deduce the EGZ theorem as a consequence.
There exists just one regular polytope of rank larger than 3 whose full automorphism group is a projective general linear group PGL_2(q), for some prime-power q. This polytope is the 4-simplex and the corresponding group is PGL_2(5), which is isomorphic to S_5.
This article gives necessary and sufficient conditions for a relation to be the containment relation between the facets and vertices of a polytope. Also given here, are a set of matrices parameterizing the linear moduli space and another set parameterizing the projective moduli space of a combinatorial polytope.
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 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…
The positive semidefinite (psd) rank of a polytope is the size of the smallest psd cone that admits an affine slice that projects linearly onto the polytope. The psd rank of a d-polytope is at least d+1, and when equality holds we say that the polytope is psd-minimal. In this paper we develop new tools for the study of psd-minimality and use them to give a complete classification of psd-minimal 4-polytopes. The main tools introduced are trinomial obstructions, a new algebraic obstruction for psd-minimality, and the slack ideal of a polytope, which encodes the space of realizations of a polytop…
When the standard representation of a crystallographic Coxeter group G (with string diagram) is reduced modulo the integer d>1, one obtains a finite group G^d which is often the automorphism group of an abstract regular polytope. Building on earlier work in the case that d is an odd prime, we here develop methods to handle composite moduli and completely describe the corresponding modular polytopes when G is of spherical or Euclidean type. Using a modular variant of the quotient criterion, we then describe the locally toroidal polytopes provided by our construction, most of which are new.
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 prove that if G is a string C-group of rank 4 and G is isomorphic to L_2(q) with q a prime power, then q must be 11 or 19. The polytopes arising are Grunbaum's 11-cell of type {3,5,3} for L_2(11) and Coxeter's 57-cell of type {5,3,5} for L_2(19), each a locally projective regular 4-polytope.
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 provide a complete classification up to isomorphism of all smooth convex lattice 3-polytopes with at most 16 lattice points. There exist in total 103 different polytopes meeting these criteria. Of these, 99 are strict Cayley polytopes and the remaining 4 are obtained as inverse stellar subdivisions of such polytopes. We derive a classification, up to isomorphism, of all smooth embeddings of toric threefolds in $\mathbb{P}^N$ where $N\le 15$. Again we have in total 103 such embeddings. Of these, 99 are projective bundles embedded in $\mathbb{P}^N$ and the remaining 4 are blow-ups of such tor…
We augment the list of finite universal locally toroidal regular polytopes of type {3,3,4,3,3} due to P.McMullen and E.Schulte, adding as well as removing entries. This disproves a related long-standing conjecture. Our new universal polytope is related to a well-known Y-shaped presentation for the sporadic simple group $Fi_{22}$, and admits $S_4\times O_8^+(2){:}S_3$ as the automorphism group. We also discuss further extensions of its quotients in the context of Y-shaped presentations. As well, we note that two known examples of finite universal polytopes of type {3,3,4,3,3} are related to Y-s…
