Polytopality and Cartesian products of graphs

We study the question of polytopality of graphs: when is a given graph the graph of a polytope? We first review the known necessary conditions for a graph to be polytopal, and we provide several families of graphs which satisfy all these conditions, but which nonetheless are not graphs of polytopes. Our main contribution concerns the polytopality of Cartesian products of non-polytopal graphs. On the one hand, we show that products of simple polytopes are the only simple polytopes whose graph is a product. On the other hand, we provide a general method to construct (non-simple) polytopal products whose factors are not polytopal.Comment: 21 pages, 10 figure

Embedding Stacked Polytopes on a Polynomial-Size Grid

A stacking operation adds a $d$-simplex on top of a facet of a simplicial $d$-polytope while maintaining the convexity of the polytope. A stacked $d$-polytope is a polytope that is obtained from a $d$-simplex and a series of stacking operations. We show that for a fixed $d$ every stacked $d$-polytope with $n$ vertices can be realized with nonnegative integer coordinates. The coordinates are bounded by $O(n^{2\log(2d)})$, except for one axis, where the coordinates are bounded by $O(n^{3\log(2d)})$. The described realization can be computed with an easy algorithm. The realization of the polytopes is obtained with a lifting technique which produces an embedding on a large grid. We establish a rounding scheme that places the vertices on a sparser grid, while maintaining the convexity of the embedding.Comment: 22 pages, 10 Figure

Small grid embeddings of 3-polytopes

We introduce an algorithm that embeds a given 3-connected planar graph as a convex 3-polytope with integer coordinates. The size of the coordinates is bounded by $O(2^{7.55n})=O(188^{n})$. If the graph contains a triangle we can bound the integer coordinates by $O(2^{4.82n})$. If the graph contains a quadrilateral we can bound the integer coordinates by $O(2^{5.46n})$. The crucial part of the algorithm is to find a convex plane embedding whose edges can be weighted such that the sum of the weighted edges, seen as vectors, cancel at every point. It is well known that this can be guaranteed for the interior vertices by applying a technique of Tutte. We show how to extend Tutte's ideas to construct a plane embedding where the weighted vector sums cancel also on the vertices of the boundary face

Strictly convex drawings of planar graphs

Every three-connected planar graph with n vertices has a drawing on an O(n^2) x O(n^2) grid in which all faces are strictly convex polygons. These drawings are obtained by perturbing (not strictly) convex drawings on O(n) x O(n) grids. More generally, a strictly convex drawing exists on a grid of size O(W) x O(n^4/W), for any choice of a parameter W in the range n<W<n^2. Tighter bounds are obtained when the faces have fewer sides. In the proof, we derive an explicit lower bound on the number of primitive vectors in a triangle.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figures. to be published in Documenta Mathematica. The revision includes numerous small additions, corrections, and improvements, in particular: - a discussion of the constants in the O-notation, after the statement of thm.1. - a different set-up and clarification of the case distinction for Lemma

Polygonal Complexes and Graphs for Crystallographic Groups

The paper surveys highlights of the ongoing program to classify discrete polyhedral structures in Euclidean 3-space by distinguished transitivity properties of their symmetry groups, focussing in particular on various aspects of the classification of regular polygonal complexes, chiral polyhedra, and more generally, two-orbit polyhedra.Comment: 21 pages; In: Symmetry and Rigidity, (eds. R.Connelly, A.Ivic Weiss and W.Whiteley), Fields Institute Communications, to appea

Moduli of Tropical Plane Curves

We study the moduli space of metric graphs that arise from tropical plane curves. There are far fewer such graphs than tropicalizations of classical plane curves. For fixed genus $g$, our moduli space is a stacky fan whose cones are indexed by regular unimodular triangulations of Newton polygons with $g$ interior lattice points. It has dimension $2g+1$ unless $g \leq 3$ or $g = 7$. We compute these spaces explicitly for $g \leq 5$.Comment: 31 pages, 25 figure