The Hirsch conjecture holds for normal flag complexes

Using an intuition from metric geometry, we prove that any flag and normal simplicial complex satisfies the non-revisiting path conjecture. As a consequence, the diameter of its facet-ridge graph is smaller than the number of vertices minus the dimension, as in the Hirsch conjecture. This proves the Hirsch conjecture for all flag polytopes, and more generally, for all (connected) flag homology manifolds.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure; to appear in Mathematics of Operations Researc

On the dual graph of Cohen-Macaulay algebras

Given a projective algebraic set X, its dual graph G(X) is the graph whose vertices are the irreducible components of X and whose edges connect components that intersect in codimension one. Hartshorne's connectedness theorem says that if (the coordinate ring of) X is Cohen-Macaulay, then G(X) is connected. We present two quantitative variants of Hartshorne's result: 1) If X is a Gorenstein subspace arrangement, then G(X) is r-connected, where r is the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of X. (The bound is best possible; for coordinate arrangements, it yields an algebraic extension of Balinski's theorem for simplicial polytopes.) 2) If X is a canonically embedded arrangement of lines no three of which meet in the same point, then the diameter of the graph G(X) is not larger than the codimension of X. (The bound is sharp; for coordinate arrangements, it yields an algebraic expansion on the recent combinatorial result that the Hirsch conjecture holds for flag normal simplicial complexes.)Comment: Minor changes throughout, Remark 4.1 expanded, to appear in IMR

Recent progress on the combinatorial diameter of polytopes and simplicial complexes

The Hirsch conjecture, posed in 1957, stated that the graph of a $d$-dimensional polytope or polyhedron with $n$ facets cannot have diameter greater than $n - d$. The conjecture itself has been disproved, but what we know about the underlying question is quite scarce. Most notably, no polynomial upper bound is known for the diameters that were conjectured to be linear. In contrast, no polyhedron violating the conjecture by more than 25% is known. This paper reviews several recent attempts and progress on the question. Some work in the world of polyhedra or (more often) bounded polytopes, but some try to shed light on the question by generalizing it to simplicial complexes. In particular, we include here our recent and previously unpublished proof that the maximum diameter of arbitrary simplicial complexes is in $n^{Theta(d)}$ and we summarize the main ideas in the polymath 3 project, a web-based collective effort trying to prove an upper bound of type nd for the diameters of polyhedra and of more general objects (including, e. g., simplicial manifolds).Comment: 34 pages. This paper supersedes one cited as "On the maximum diameter of simplicial complexes and abstractions of them, in preparation

Stellar theory for flag complexes

Refining a basic result of Alexander, we show that two flag simplicial complexes are piecewise linearly homeomorphic if and only if they can be connected by a sequence of flag complexes, each obtained from the previous one by either an edge subdivision or its inverse. For flag spheres we pose new conjectures on their combinatorial structure forced by their face numbers, analogous to the extremal examples in the upper and lower bound theorems for simplicial spheres. Furthermore, we show that our algorithm to test the conjectures searches through the entire space of flag PL spheres of any given dimension.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures. Notation unified and presentation of proofs improve

A counterexample to the Hirsch conjecture

The Hirsch Conjecture (1957) stated that the graph of a $d$-dimensional polytope with $n$ facets cannot have (combinatorial) diameter greater than $n-d$. That is, that any two vertices of the polytope can be connected by a path of at most $n-d$ edges. This paper presents the first counterexample to the conjecture. Our polytope has dimension 43 and 86 facets. It is obtained from a 5-dimensional polytope with 48 facets which violates a certain generalization of the $d$-step conjecture of Klee and Walkup.Comment: 28 pages, 10 Figures: Changes from v2: Minor edits suggested by referees. This version has been accepted in the Annals of Mathematic

On the diameter of an ideal

We begin the study of the notion of diameter of an ideal I of a polynomial ring S over a field, an invariant measuring the distance between the minimal primes of I. We provide large classes of Hirsch ideals, i.e. ideals with diameter not larger than the codimension, such as: quadratic radical ideals of codimension at most 4 and such that S/I is Gorenstein, or ideals admitting a square-free complete intersection initial ideal