Associahedra via spines

An associahedron is a polytope whose vertices correspond to triangulations of a convex polygon and whose edges correspond to flips between them. Using labeled polygons, C. Hohlweg and C. Lange constructed various realizations of the associahedron with relevant properties related to the symmetric group and the classical permutahedron. We introduce the spine of a triangulation as its dual tree together with a labeling and an orientation. This notion extends the classical understanding of the associahedron via binary trees, introduces a new perspective on C. Hohlweg and C. Lange's construction closer to J.-L. Loday's original approach, and sheds light upon the combinatorial and geometric properties of the resulting realizations of the associahedron. It also leads to noteworthy proofs which shorten and simplify previous approaches.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figures. Version 5: minor correction

Finding Optimal Triangulations Parameterized by Edge Clique Cover

Peer reviewe

Finding Optimal Triangulations Parameterized by Edge Clique Cover

Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).We consider problems that can be formulated as a task of finding an optimal triangulation of a graph w.r.t. some notion of optimality. We present algorithms parameterized by the size of a minimum edge clique cover (cc) to such problems. This parameterization occurs naturally in many problems in this setting, e.g., in the perfect phylogeny problem cc is at most the number of taxa, in fractional hypertreewidth cc is at most the number of hyperedges, and in treewidth of Bayesian networks cc is at most the number of non-root nodes. We show that the number of minimal separators of graphs is at most 2 cc, the number of potential maximal cliques is at most 3 cc, and these objects can be listed in times O∗(2 cc) and O∗(3 cc) , respectively, even when no edge clique cover is given as input; the O∗(·) notation omits factors polynomial in the input size. These enumeration algorithms imply O∗(3 cc) time algorithms for problems such as treewidth, weighted minimum fill-in, and feedback vertex set. For generalized and fractional hypertreewidth we give O∗(4 m) time and O∗(3 m) time algorithms, respectively, where m is the number of hyperedges. When an edge clique cover of size cc′ is given as a part of the input we give O∗(2cc′) time algorithms for treewidth, minimum fill-in, and chordal sandwich. This implies an O∗(2 n) time algorithm for perfect phylogeny, where n is the number of taxa. We also give polynomial space algorithms with time complexities O∗(9cc′) and O∗(9cc+O(log2cc)) for problems in this framework.Peer reviewe

Triangle-Free Triangulations, Hyperplane Arrangements and Shifted Tableaux

Flips of diagonals in colored triangle-free triangulations of a convex polygon are interpreted as moves between two adjacent chambers in a certain graphic hyperplane arrangement. Properties of geodesics in the associated flip graph are deduced. In particular, it is shown that: (1) every diagonal is flipped exactly once in a geodesic between distinguished pairs of antipodes; (2) the number of geodesics between these antipodes is equal to twice the number of Young tableaux of a truncated shifted staircase shape.Comment: figure added, plus several minor change

Lower Bounds for Real Solutions to Sparse Polynomial Systems

We show how to construct sparse polynomial systems that have non-trivial lower bounds on their numbers of real solutions. These are unmixed systems associated to certain polytopes. For the order polytope of a poset P this lower bound is the sign-imbalance of P and it holds if all maximal chains of P have length of the same parity. This theory also gives lower bounds in the real Schubert calculus through sagbi degeneration of the Grassmannian to a toric variety, and thus recovers a result of Eremenko and Gabrielov.Comment: 31 pages. Minor revision

Polyhedral geometry for lecture hall partitions

Lecture hall partitions are a fundamental combinatorial structure which have been studied extensively over the past two decades. These objects have produced new results, as well as reinterpretations and generalizations of classicial results, which are of interest in combinatorial number theory, enumerative combinatorics, and convex geometry. In a recent survey of Savage \cite{Savage-LHP-Survey}, a wide variety of these results are nicely presented. However, since the publication of this survey, there have been many new developments related to the polyhedral geometry and Ehrhart theory arising from lecture hall partitions. Subsequently, in this survey article, we focus exclusively on the polyhedral geometric results in the theory of lecture hall partitions in an effort to showcase these new developments. In particular, we highlight results on lecture hall cones, lecture hall simplices, and lecture hall order polytopes. We conclude with an extensive list of open problems and conjectures in this area.Comment: 20 pages; To appear in to proceedings of the 2018 Summer Workshop on Lattice Polytopes at Osaka Universit