On positivity of Ehrhart polynomials

Ehrhart discovered that the function that counts the number of lattice points in dilations of an integral polytope is a polynomial. We call the coefficients of this polynomial Ehrhart coefficients, and say a polytope is Ehrhart positive if all Ehrhart coefficients are positive (which is not true for all integral polytopes). The main purpose of this article is to survey interesting families of polytopes that are known to be Ehrhart positive and discuss the reasons from which their Ehrhart positivity follows. We also include examples of polytopes that have negative Ehrhart coefficients and polytopes that are conjectured to be Ehrhart positive, as well as pose a few relevant questions.Comment: 40 pages, 7 figures. To appear in in Recent Trends in Algebraic Combinatorics, a volume of the Association for Women in Mathematics Series, Springer International Publishin

Interlacing Ehrhart Polynomials of Reflexive Polytopes

It was observed by Bump et al. that Ehrhart polynomials in a special family exhibit properties similar to the Riemann {\zeta} function. The construction was generalized by Matsui et al. to a larger family of reflexive polytopes coming from graphs. We prove several conjectures confirming when such polynomials have zeros on a certain line in the complex plane. Our main new method is to prove a stronger property called interlacing

Roots of Ehrhart Polynomials of Smooth Fano Polytopes

V. Golyshev conjectured that for any smooth polytope P of dimension at most five, the roots z\in\C of the Ehrhart polynomial for P have real part equal to -1/2. An elementary proof is given, and in each dimension the roots are described explicitly. We also present examples which demonstrate that this result cannot be extended to dimension six.Comment: 10 page

Unimodality Problems in Ehrhart Theory

Ehrhart theory is the study of sequences recording the number of integer points in non-negative integral dilates of rational polytopes. For a given lattice polytope, this sequence is encoded in a finite vector called the Ehrhart $h^*$-vector. Ehrhart $h^*$-vectors have connections to many areas of mathematics, including commutative algebra and enumerative combinatorics. In this survey we discuss what is known about unimodality for Ehrhart $h^*$-vectors and highlight open questions and problems.Comment: Published in Recent Trends in Combinatorics, Beveridge, A., et al. (eds), Springer, 2016, pp 687-711, doi 10.1007/978-3-319-24298-9_27. This version updated October 2017 to correct an error in the original versio