Obstructions to shellability, partitionability, and sequential Cohen-Macaulayness

For a property $\cal P$ of simplicial complexes, a simplicial complex $\Gamma$ is an obstruction to $\cal P$ if $\Gamma$ itself does not satisfy $\cal P$ but all of its proper restrictions satisfy $\cal P$. In this paper, we determine all obstructions to shellability of dimension $\le 2$, refining the previous work by Wachs. As a consequence we obtain that the set of obstructions to shellability, that to partitionability and that to sequential Cohen-Macaulayness all coincide for dimensions $\le 2$. We also show that these three sets of obstructions coincide in the class of flag complexes. These results show that the three properties, hereditary-shellability, hereditary-partitionability, and hereditary-sequential Cohen-Macaulayness are equivalent for these classes

Unique Sink Orientations of Grids

We introduce unique sink orientations of grids as digraph models for many well-studied problems, including linear programming over products of simplices, generalized linear complementarity problems over P-matrices (PGLCP), and simple stochastic games. We investigate the combinatorial structure of such orientations and develop randomized algorithms for finding the sink. We show that the orientations arising from PGLCP satisfy the Holt-Klee condition known to hold for polytope digraphs, and we give the first expected linear-time algorithms for solving PGLCP with a fixed number of block

Strongly Signable and Partitionable Posets

The class of Strongly Signable partially ordered sets is introduced and studied. It is show that strong signability, reminiscent of Björner–Wachs ’ recursive coatom orderability, provides a useful and broad sufficient condition for a poset to be dual CR and hence partitionable. The flag h-vectors of strongly signable posets are therefore non-negative. It is proved that recursively shellable posets, polyhedral fans, and face lattices of partitionable simplicial complexes are all strongly signable, and it is conjectured that all spherical posets are. It is concluded that the barycentric subdivision of a partitionable complex is again partitionable, and an algorithm for producing a partitioning of the subdivision from a partitioning of the complex is described. An expression for the flag h-polynomial of a simplicial complex in terms of its h-vector is given, and is used to demonstrate that the flag h-vector is symmetric or non-negative whenever the h-vector is