Enumerating Triangulations of Convex Polytopes

Abstract

A triangulation of a finite point set A in $\mathbb{R}^d$ is a geometric simplicial complex which covers the convex hull of $A$ and whose vertices are points of $A$. We study the graph of triangulations whose vertices represent the triangulations and whose edges represent geometric bistellar flips. The main result of this paper is that the graph of triangulations in three dimensions is connected when the points of $A$ are in convex position. We introduce a tree of triangulations and present an algorithm for enumerating triangulations in $O(log log n)$ time per triangulation.