D-dimensional Convex Polytope Research Articles

On the Number of Vertices of a Convex Polytope

As is well known, the theory of linear inequalities is closely related to the study of convex polytopes. If the bounded subset P of euclidean d-space has a non-empty interior and is determined by i linear inequalities in d variables, then P is a d-dimensional convex polytope (here called a d-polytope) which may have as many as i faces of dimension d — 1, and the vertices of this polytope are exactly the basic solutions of the system of inequalities. Thus, to obtain an upper estimate of the size of the computation problem which must be faced in solving a system of linear inequalities, it suffices to find an upper bound for the number f0(P) of vertices of a d-polytope P which has a given number fd-1(P) of (d — l)-faces. A weak bound of this sort was found by Saaty (14), and several authors have posed the problem of finding a sharp estimate.

Diameters of Polyhedral Graphs

The distance between two vertices of a connected finite graph is the smallest number of edges forming a path that joins the two vertices, and the diameter of the graph is the largest integer which is realized as the distance between two vertices of the graph. We are concerned here with the diameters of two graphs associated with a d-dimensional convex polytope P (called henceforth a d-polytope). The graph Γ(P) of P is the 1- complex formed by the vertices and edges of P , and the polar graph II (P) of P is the 1-complex whose vertices correspond to the (d — 1)-faces of P, with two vertices joined by an edge in II (P) if and only if the corresponding (d — 1)- faces intersect in a (d — 2)-face of P. The diameters of Γ(P) and II (P) will be denoted respectively by δ(P) (called the diameter of P) and ϕ(Ps) (called the face-diameter of P ).

Remarks on the Combinatorial Intersection Cohomology of Fans

We review the theory of combinatorial intersection cohomology of fans developed by Barthel-Brasselet-Fieseler-Kaup, Bressler-Lunts, and Karu. This theory gives a substitute for the intersection cohomology of toric varieties which has all the expected formal properties but makes sense even for non-rational fans, which do not define a toric variety. As a result, a number of interesting results on the toric g and h polynomials have been extended from rational polytopes to general polytopes. We present explicit complexes computing the combinatorial IH in degrees one and two; the degree two complex gives the rigidity complex previously used by Kalai to study g2. We present several new results which follow from these methods, as well as previously unpublished proofs of Kalai that gk(P ) = 0 implies gk(P ∗) = 0 and gk+1(P ) = 0. For a d-dimensional convex polytope P , Stanley [St2] defined a polynomial invariant h(P, t) = ∑d k=0 hk(P )t k of its face lattice, which is usually called the “generalized” or “toric” h-polynomial of P . It is “generalized” in that it extends a previous definition from simplicial polytopes to general polytopes, while the adjective “toric” refers to the fact that if P is a rational polytope (meaning that all its vertices have all coordinates in Q), then the coefficients of h(P, t) are intersection cohomology Betti numbers of an associated projective toric variety XP : (1) hk(P ) = dimR IH(XP ;R). In fact, these Betti numbers had been computed independently by several people, including Robert MacPherson, and these calculations inspired Stanley’s definition Received November 20, 2005. The author was supported in part by NSF grant DMS-0201823.