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 investigate the line arrangement that results from intersecting d complete flags in C^n. We give a combinatorial description of the matroid T_{n,d} that keeps track of the linear dependence relations among these lines. We prove that the bases of the matroid T_{n,3} characterize the triangles with holes which can be tiled with unit rhombi. More generally, we provide evidence for a conjectural connection between the matroid T_{n,d}, the triangulations of the product of simplices Delta_{n-1} x Δ_{d-1}, and the arrangements of d tropical hyperplanes in tropical (n-1)-space. Our work provides a …
A flip is a minimal move between two triangulations of a polytope. An open question is whether any two triangulations of the product of two simplices can be connected through a series of flips. This was proven in the case where one of the simplices is a triangle by Santos in 2005. In this paper we extend this to when one of the simplices is a tetrahedron.
In this paper, we explain how the classical Catalan families of objects involving paths, tableaux, triangulations, parentheses configurations and more generalize canonically to a three-dimensional version. In particular, we present product-coproduct prographs as central objects explaining the combinatorics of the triangulations of the sphere. Then we expose a natural way to extend the Tamari lattice to the product-coproduct prographs.
Products of simplices, called simplotopes, and their triangulations arise naturally in algorithmic applications in game theory and optimization. We develop techniques to derive lower bounds for the size of simplicial covers and triangulations of simplotopes, including those with interior vertices. We establish that a minimal triangulation of a product of two simplices is given by a vertex triangulation, i.e., one without interior vertices. For products of more than two simplices, we produce bounds for products of segments and triangles. Aside from cubes, these are the first known lower bounds …
The acyclic system conjecture of Ardila and Ceballos can be interpreted as saying the following: "Every triangulation of the 3-skeleton of a product of two simplices can be extended to a triangulation of the whole product". We show a counter-example to this. Motivation for this conjecture comes from a related conjecture, the "spread-out simplices" conjecture of Ardila and Billey. We give some necessary conditions that counter-examples to this second conjecture (if they exist) must satisfy.
We introduce the Dyck path triangulation of the cartesian product of two simplices $Δ_{n-1}\timesΔ_{n-1}$. The maximal simplices of this triangulation are given by Dyck paths, and its construction naturally generalizes to produce triangulations of $Δ_{r\ n-1}\timesΔ_{n-1}$ using rational Dyck paths. Our study of the Dyck path triangulation is motivated by extendability problems of partial triangulations of products of two simplices. We show that whenever $m\geq k>n$, any triangulation of $Δ_{m-1}^{(k-1)}\timesΔ_{n-1}$ extends to a unique triangulation of $Δ_{m-1}\timesΔ_{n-1}$. Moreover, with …
We use the Cayley Trick to study polyhedral subdivisions of the product of two simplices. For arbitrary (fixed) $l$, we show that the numbers of regular and non-regular triangulations of $Δ^l\timesΔ^k$ grow, respectively, as $k^{Θ(k)}$ and $2^{Ω(k^2)}$. For the special case of $l=2$, we relate triangulations to certain class of lozenge tilings. This allows us to compute the exact number of triangulations up to $k=15$, show that the number grows as $e^{βk^2/2 + o(k^2)}$ where $β\simeq 0.32309594$ and prove that the set of all triangulations is connected under geometric bistellar flips. The latt…
We introduce a construction of oriented matroids from a triangulation of a product of two simplices. For this, we use the structure of such a triangulation in terms of polyhedral matching fields. The oriented matroid is composed of compatible chirotopes on the cells in a matroid subdivision of the hypersimplex, which might be of independent interest. In particular, we generalize this using the language of matroids over hyperfields, which gives a new approach to construct matroids over hyperfields. A recurring theme in our work is that various tropical constructions can be extended beyond tropi…
The KP hierarchy is a completely integrable system of quadratic, partial differential equations that generalizes the KdV hierarchy. A linear combination of Schur functions is a solution to the KP hierarchy if and only if its coefficients satisfy the Plucker relations from geometry. We give a solution to the Plucker relations involving products of variables marking contents for a partition, and thus give a new proof of a content product solution to the KP hierarchy, previously given by Orlov and Shcherbin. In our main result, we specialize this content product solution to prove that the generat…
Let $P$ and $Q$ be polytopes, the first of "low" dimension and the second of "high" dimension. We show how to triangulate the product $P \times Q$ efficiently (i.e., with few simplices) starting with a given triangulation of $Q$. Our method has a computational part, where we need to compute an efficient triangulation of $P \times Δ^m$, for a (small) natural number $m$ of our choice. $Δ^m$ denotes the $m$-simplex. Our procedure can be applied to obtain (asymptotically) efficient triangulations of the cube $I^n$: We decompose $I^n = I^k \times I^{n-k}$, for a small $k$. Then we recursively assum…
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…
We prove that the second derived subdivision of any rectilinear triangulation of any convex polytope is shellable. Also, we prove that the first derived subdivision of every rectilinear triangulation of any convex 3-dimensional polytope is shellable. This complements Mary Ellen Rudin's classical example of a non-shellable rectilinear triangulation of the tetrahedron. Our main tool is a new relative notion of shellability that characterizes the behavior of shellable complexes under gluing. As a corollary, we obtain a new characterization of the PL property in terms of shellability: A triangulat…
We give a complete enumeration of all combinatorial 3-manifolds with 10 vertices: There are precisely 247882 triangulated 3-spheres with 10 vertices as well as 518 vertex-minimal triangulations of the sphere product $S^2\times S^1$ and 615 triangulations of the twisted sphere product $S^2_\times_S^1$. All the 3-spheres with up to 10 vertices are shellable, but there are 29 vertex-minimal non-shellable 3-balls with 9 vertices.
A centrally symmetric $2d$-vertex combinatorial triangulation of the product of spheres $§^i\times§^{d-2-i}$ is constructed for all pairs of non-negative integers $i$ and $d$ with $0\leq i \leq d-2$. For the case of $i=d-2-i$, the existence of such a triangulation was conjectured by Sparla. The constructed complex admits a vertex-transitive action by a group of order $4d$. The crux of this construction is a definition of a certain full-dimensional subcomplex, $\B(i,d)$, of the boundary complex of the $d$-dimensional cross-polytope. This complex $\B(i,d)$ is a combinatorial manifold with bounda…
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…
This thesis explores two specific topics of discrete geometry, the multitriangulations and the polytopal realizations of products, whose connection is the problem of finding polytopal realizations of a given combinatorial structure. A k-triangulation is a maximal set of chords of the convex n-gon such that no k+1 of them mutually cross. We propose a combinatorial and geometric study of multitriangulations based on their stars, which play the same role as triangles of triangulations. This study leads to interpret multitriangulations by duality as pseudoline arrangements with contact points cove…
For any finite set $\A$ of $n$ points in $\R^2$, we define a $(3n-3)$-dimensional simple polyhedron whose face poset is isomorphic to the poset of ``non-crossing marked graphs'' with vertex set $\A$, where a marked graph is defined as a geometric graph together with a subset of its vertices. The poset of non-crossing graphs on $\A$ appears as the complement of the star of a face in that polyhedron. The polyhedron has a unique maximal bounded face, of dimension $2n_i +n -3$ where $n_i$ is the number of points of $\A$ in the interior of $\conv(\A)$. The vertices of this polytope are all the pseu…
In this paper, we exploit the combinatorics and geometry of triangulations of products of simplices to derive new results in the context of Catalan combinatorics of $ν$-Tamari lattices. In our framework, the main role of "Catalan objects" is played by $(I,\overline{J})$-trees: bipartite trees associated to a pair $(I,\overline{J})$ of finite index sets that stand in simple bijection with lattice paths weakly above a lattice path $ν=ν(I,\overline{J})$. Such trees label the maximal simplices of a triangulation whose dual polyhedral complex gives a geometric realization of the $ν$-Tamari lattice …