On the structure of Stanley-Reisner rings associated to cyclic polytopes

We study the structure of Stanley-Reisner rings associated to cyclic polytopes, using ideas from unprojection theory. Consider the boundary simplicial complex Delta(d,m) of the d-dimensional cyclic polytope with m vertices. We show how to express the Stanley-Reisner ring of Delta(d,m+1) in terms of the Stanley-Reisner rings of Delta(d,m) and Delta(d-2,m-1). As an application, we use the Kustin-Miller complex construction to identify the minimal graded free resolutions of these rings. In particular, we recover results of Schenzel, Terai and Hibi about their graded Betti numbers.Comment: Version 2, minor improvements, 20 pages. Package may be downloaded at http://www.math.uni-sb.de/ag/schreyer/jb/Macaulay2/CyclicPolytopeRes/html

Tropical types and associated cellular resolutions

An arrangement of finitely many tropical hyperplanes in the tropical torus leads to a notion of `type' data for points, with the underlying unlabeled arrangement giving rise to `coarse type'. It is shown that the decomposition of the tropical torus induced by types gives rise to minimal cocellular resolutions of certain associated monomial ideals. Via the Cayley trick from geometric combinatorics this also yields cellular resolutions supported on mixed subdivisions of dilated simplices, extending previously known constructions. Moreover, the methods developed lead to an algebraic algorithm for computing the facial structure of arbitrary tropical complexes from point data.Comment: minor correction