The combinatorics of interval-vector polytopes

An \emph{interval vector} is a $(0,1)$-vector in $\mathbb{R}^n$ for which all the 1's appear consecutively, and an \emph{interval-vector polytope} is the convex hull of a set of interval vectors in $\mathbb{R}^n$. We study three particular classes of interval vector polytopes which exhibit interesting geometric-combinatorial structures; e.g., one class has volumes equal to the Catalan numbers, whereas another class has face numbers given by the Pascal 3-triangle.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Combinatorics and Geometry of Transportation Polytopes: An Update

A transportation polytope consists of all multidimensional arrays or tables of non-negative real numbers that satisfy certain sum conditions on subsets of the entries. They arise naturally in optimization and statistics, and also have interest for discrete mathematics because permutation matrices, latin squares, and magic squares appear naturally as lattice points of these polytopes. In this paper we survey advances on the understanding of the combinatorics and geometry of these polyhedra and include some recent unpublished results on the diameter of graphs of these polytopes. In particular, this is a thirty-year update on the status of a list of open questions last visited in the 1984 book by Yemelichev, Kovalev and Kravtsov and the 1986 survey paper of Vlach.Comment: 35 pages, 13 figure

Neighborly inscribed polytopes and Delaunay triangulations

We construct a large family of neighborly polytopes that can be realized with all the vertices on the boundary of any smooth strictly convex body. In particular, we show that there are superexponentially many combinatorially distinct neighborly polytopes that admit realizations inscribed on the sphere. These are the first examples of inscribable neighborly polytopes that are not cyclic polytopes, and provide the current best lower bound for the number of combinatorial types of inscribable polytopes (which coincides with the current best lower bound for the number of combinatorial types of polytopes). Via stereographic projections, this translates into a superexponential lower bound for the number of combinatorial types of (neighborly) Delaunay triangulations.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures. We extended our results to arbitrary smooth strictly convex bodie

Few smooth d-polytopes with n lattice points

We prove that, for fixed n there exist only finitely many embeddings of Q-factorial toric varieties X into P^n that are induced by a complete linear system. The proof is based on a combinatorial result that for fixed nonnegative integers d and n, there are only finitely many smooth d-polytopes with n lattice points. We also enumerate all smooth 3-polytopes with at most 12 lattice points. In fact, it is sufficient to bound the singularities and the number of lattice points on edges to prove finiteness.Comment: 20+2 pages; major revision: new author, new structure, new result