277 research outputs found
Combinatorial Space Tiling
The present article studies combinatorial tilings of Euclidean or spherical
spaces by polytopes, serving two main purposes: first, to survey some of the
main developments in combinatorial space tiling; and second, to highlight some
new and some old open problems in this area.Comment: 16 pages; to appear in "Symmetry: Culture and Science
Many projectively unique polytopes
We construct an infinite family of 4-polytopes whose realization spaces have
dimension smaller or equal to 96. This in particular settles a problem going
back to Legendre and Steinitz: whether and how the dimension of the realization
space of a polytope is determined/bounded by its f-vector.
From this, we derive an infinite family of combinatorially distinct
69-dimensional polytopes whose realization is unique up to projective
transformation. This answers a problem posed by Perles and Shephard in the
sixties. Moreover, our methods naturally lead to several interesting classes of
projectively unique polytopes, among them projectively unique polytopes
inscribed to the sphere.
The proofs rely on a novel construction technique for polytopes based on
solving Cauchy problems for discrete conjugate nets in S^d, a new
Alexandrov--van Heijenoort Theorem for manifolds with boundary and a
generalization of Lawrence's extension technique for point configurations.Comment: 44 pages, 18 figures; to appear in Invent. mat
A counterexample to the Hirsch conjecture
The Hirsch Conjecture (1957) stated that the graph of a -dimensional
polytope with facets cannot have (combinatorial) diameter greater than
. That is, that any two vertices of the polytope can be connected by a
path of at most 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 -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
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