Tverberg plus constraints

Many of the strengthenings and extensions of the topological Tverberg theorem can be derived with surprising ease directly from the original theorem: For this we introduce a proof technique that combines a concept of "Tverberg unavoidable subcomplexes" with the observation that Tverberg points that equalize the distance from such a subcomplex can be obtained from maps to an extended target space. Thus we obtain simple proofs for many variants of the topological Tverberg theorem, such as the colored Tverberg theorem of Zivaljevic and Vrecica (1992). We also get a new strengthened version of the generalized van Kampen-Flores theorem by Sarkaria (1991) and Volovikov (1996), an affine version of their "j-wise disjoint" Tverberg theorem, and a topological version of Soberon's (2013) result on Tverberg points with equal barycentric coordinates.Comment: 15 pages; revised version, accepted for publication in Bulletin London Math. Societ

Tverberg's theorem with constraints

The topological Tverberg theorem claims that for any continuous map of the (q-1)(d+1)-simplex to R^d there are q disjoint faces such that their images have a non-empty intersection. This has been proved for affine maps, and if $q$ is a prime power, but not in general. We extend the topological Tverberg theorem in the following way: Pairs of vertices are forced to end up in different faces. This leads to the concept of constraint graphs. In Tverberg's theorem with constraints, we come up with a list of constraints graphs for the topological Tverberg theorem. The proof is based on connectivity results of chessboard-type complexes. Moreover, Tverberg's theorem with constraints implies new lower bounds for the number of Tverberg partitions. As a consequence, we prove Sierksma's conjecture for $d=2$, and $q=3$.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in JCTA. Substantial revision due to the referee