Empty Simplices of Polytopes and Graded Betti Numbers

Abstract

The conjecture of Kalai, Kleinschmidt, and Lee on the number of empty simplices of a simplicial polytope is established by relating it to the first graded Betti numbers of the polytope and applying a result of Migliore and the author. This approach allows us to derive explicit optimal bounds on the number of empty simplices of any given dimension. As a key result, we prove optimal bounds for the graded Betti numbers of any standard graded K-algebra in terms of its Hilbert function.