There are 174 Subdivisions of the Hexahedron into Tetrahedra

This article answers an important theoretical question: How many different subdivisions of the hexahedron into tetrahedra are there? It is well known that the cube has five subdivisions into 6 tetrahedra and one subdivision into 5 tetrahedra. However, all hexahedra are not cubes and moving the vertex positions increases the number of subdivisions. Recent hexahedral dominant meshing methods try to take these configurations into account for combining tetrahedra into hexahedra, but fail to enumerate them all: they use only a set of 10 subdivisions among the 174 we found in this article. The enumeration of these 174 subdivisions of the hexahedron into tetrahedra is our combinatorial result. Each of the 174 subdivisions has between 5 and 15 tetrahedra and is actually a class of 2 to 48 equivalent instances which are identical up to vertex relabeling. We further show that exactly 171 of these subdivisions have a geometrical realization, i.e. there exist coordinates of the eight hexahedron vertices in a three-dimensional space such that the geometrical tetrahedral mesh is valid. We exhibit the tetrahedral meshes for these configurations and show in particular subdivisions of hexahedra with 15 tetrahedra that have a strictly positive Jacobian

Enumeration of PLCP-orientations of the 4-cube

The linear complementarity problem (LCP) provides a unified approach to many problems such as linear programs, convex quadratic programs, and bimatrix games. The general LCP is known to be NP-hard, but there are some promising results that suggest the possibility that the LCP with a P-matrix (PLCP) may be polynomial-time solvable. However, no polynomial-time algorithm for the PLCP has been found yet and the computational complexity of the PLCP remains open. Simple principal pivoting (SPP) algorithms, also known as Bard-type algorithms, are candidates for polynomial-time algorithms for the PLCP. In 1978, Stickney and Watson interpreted SPP algorithms as a family of algorithms that seek the sink of unique-sink orientations of $n$-cubes. They performed the enumeration of the arising orientations of the $3$-cube, hereafter called PLCP-orientations. In this paper, we present the enumeration of PLCP-orientations of the $4$-cube.The enumeration is done via construction of oriented matroids generalizing P-matrices and realizability classification of oriented matroids.Some insights obtained in the computational experiments are presented as well

Oriented Matroids -- Combinatorial Structures Underlying Loop Quantum Gravity

We analyze combinatorial structures which play a central role in determining spectral properties of the volume operator in loop quantum gravity (LQG). These structures encode geometrical information of the embedding of arbitrary valence vertices of a graph in 3-dimensional Riemannian space, and can be represented by sign strings containing relative orientations of embedded edges. We demonstrate that these signature factors are a special representation of the general mathematical concept of an oriented matroid. Moreover, we show that oriented matroids can also be used to describe the topology (connectedness) of directed graphs. Hence the mathematical methods developed for oriented matroids can be applied to the difficult combinatorics of embedded graphs underlying the construction of LQG. As a first application we revisit the analysis of [4-5], and find that enumeration of all possible sign configurations used there is equivalent to enumerating all realizable oriented matroids of rank 3, and thus can be greatly simplified. We find that for 7-valent vertices having no coplanar triples of edge tangents, the smallest non-zero eigenvalue of the volume spectrum does not grow as one increases the maximum spin \jmax at the vertex, for any orientation of the edge tangents. This indicates that, in contrast to the area operator, considering large \jmax does not necessarily imply large volume eigenvalues. In addition we give an outlook to possible starting points for rewriting the combinatorics of LQG in terms of oriented matroids.Comment: 43 pages, 26 figures, LaTeX. Version published in CQG. Typos corrected, presentation slightly extende

On the number of simple arrangements of five double pseudolines

We describe an incremental algorithm to enumerate the isomorphism classes of double pseudoline arrangements. The correction of our algorithm is based on the connectedness under mutations of the spaces of one-extensions of double pseudoline arrangements, proved in this paper. Counting results derived from an implementation of our algorithm are also reported.Comment: 24 pages, 16 figures, 6 table

An extensive English language bibliography on graph theory and its applications, supplement 1

Graph theory and its applications - bibliography, supplement