Polymake and Lattice Polytopes

The polymake software system deals with convex polytopes and related objects from geometric combinatorics. This note reports on a new implementation of a subclass for lattice polytopes. The features displayed are enabled by recent changes to the polymake core, which will be discussed briefly.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

Enumeration of points, lines, planes, etc

One of the earliest results in enumerative combinatorial geometry is the following theorem of de Bruijn and Erd\H{o}s: Every set of points $E$ in a projective plane determines at least $|E|$ lines, unless all the points are contained in a line. Motzkin and others extended the result to higher dimensions, who showed that every set of points $E$ in a projective space determines at least $|E|$ hyperplanes, unless all the points are contained in a hyperplane. Let $E$ be a spanning subset of a $d$-dimensional vector space. We show that, in the partially ordered set of subspaces spanned by subsets of $E$, there are at least as many $(d-k)$-dimensional subspaces as there are $k$-dimensional subspaces, for every $k$ at most $d/2$. This confirms the "top-heavy" conjecture of Dowling and Wilson for all matroids realizable over some field. The proof relies on the decomposition theorem package for $\ell$-adic intersection complexes.Comment: 18 pages, major revisio

Geometric Reasoning with polymake

The mathematical software system polymake provides a wide range of functions for convex polytopes, simplicial complexes, and other objects. A large part of this paper is dedicated to a tutorial which exemplifies the usage. Later sections include a survey of research results obtained with the help of polymake so far and a short description of the technical background

A formally verified proof of the prime number theorem

The prime number theorem, established by Hadamard and de la Vall'ee Poussin independently in 1896, asserts that the density of primes in the positive integers is asymptotic to 1 / ln x. Whereas their proofs made serious use of the methods of complex analysis, elementary proofs were provided by Selberg and Erd"os in 1948. We describe a formally verified version of Selberg's proof, obtained using the Isabelle proof assistant.Comment: 23 page

Permutation actions on equivariant cohomology

This survey paper describes two geometric representations of the permutation group using the tools of toric topology. These actions are extremely useful for computational problems in Schubert calculus. The (torus) equivariant cohomology of the flag variety is constructed using the combinatorial description of Goresky-Kottwitz-MacPherson, discussed in detail. Two permutation representations on equivariant and ordinary cohomology are identified in terms of irreducible representations of the permutation group. We show how to use the permutation actions to construct divided difference operators and to give formulas for some localizations of certain equivariant classes. This paper includes several new results, in particular a new proof of the Chevalley-Monk formula and a proof that one of the natural permutation representations on the equivariant cohomology of the flag variety is the regular representation. Many examples, exercises, and open questions are provided.Comment: 24 page

Topological obstructions for vertex numbers of Minkowski sums

We show that for polytopes P_1, P_2, ..., P_r \subset \R^d, each having n_i \ge d+1 vertices, the Minkowski sum P_1 + P_2 + ... + P_r cannot achieve the maximum of \prod_i n_i vertices if r \ge d. This complements a recent result of Fukuda & Weibel (2006), who show that this is possible for up to d-1 summands. The result is obtained by combining methods from discrete geometry (Gale transforms) and topological combinatorics (van Kampen--type obstructions) as developed in R\"{o}rig, Sanyal, and Ziegler (2007).Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures; Improved exposition and less typos. Construction/example and remarks adde