Combinatorial 3-manifolds with 10 vertices

We give a complete enumeration of all combinatorial 3-manifolds with 10 vertices: There are precisely 247882 triangulated 3-spheres with 10 vertices as well as 518 vertex-minimal triangulations of the sphere product $S^2\times S^1$ and 615 triangulations of the twisted sphere product S^2_\times_S^1. All the 3-spheres with up to 10 vertices are shellable, but there are 29 vertex-minimal non-shellable 3-balls with 9 vertices.Comment: 9 pages, minor revisions, to appear in Beitr. Algebra Geo

There are 174 Subdivisions of the Hexahedron into Tetrahedra

This article answers an important theoretical question: How many different subdivisions of the hexahedron into tetrahedra are there? It is well known that the cube has five subdivisions into 6 tetrahedra and one subdivision into 5 tetrahedra. However, all hexahedra are not cubes and moving the vertex positions increases the number of subdivisions. Recent hexahedral dominant meshing methods try to take these configurations into account for combining tetrahedra into hexahedra, but fail to enumerate them all: they use only a set of 10 subdivisions among the 174 we found in this article. The enumeration of these 174 subdivisions of the hexahedron into tetrahedra is our combinatorial result. Each of the 174 subdivisions has between 5 and 15 tetrahedra and is actually a class of 2 to 48 equivalent instances which are identical up to vertex relabeling. We further show that exactly 171 of these subdivisions have a geometrical realization, i.e. there exist coordinates of the eight hexahedron vertices in a three-dimensional space such that the geometrical tetrahedral mesh is valid. We exhibit the tetrahedral meshes for these configurations and show in particular subdivisions of hexahedra with 15 tetrahedra that have a strictly positive Jacobian

Transversals and colorings of simplicial spheres

Motivated from the surrounding property of a point set in $\mathbb{R}^d$ introduced by Holmsen, Pach and Tverberg, we consider the transversal number and chromatic number of a simplicial sphere. As an attempt to give a lower bound for the maximum transversal ratio of simplicial $d$-spheres, we provide two infinite constructions. The first construction gives infintely many $(d+1)$-dimensional simplicial polytopes with the transversal ratio exactly $\frac{2}{d+2}$ for every $d\geq 2$. In the case of $d=2$, this meets the previously well-known upper bound $1/2$ tightly. The second gives infinitely many simplicial 3-spheres with the transversal ratio greater than $1/2$. This was unexpected from what was previously known about the surrounding property. Moreover, we show that, for $d\geq 3$, the facet hypergraph $\mathcal{F}(\mathsf{K})$ of a $d$-dimensional simplicial sphere $\mathsf{K}$ has the chromatic number $\chi(\mathcal{F}(\mathsf{K})) \in O(n^{\frac{\lceil d/2\rceil-1}{d}})$, where $n$ is the number of vertices of $\mathsf{K}$. This slightly improves the upper bound previously obtained by Heise, Panagiotou, Pikhurko, and Taraz.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figure

On the Finding of Final Polynomials

Final polynomials have been used to prove non-representability for oriented matroids, i.e. to decide whether geometric embeddings of combinatorial structures exist. They received more attention when Dress and Sturmfels, independently, pointed out that non-representable oriented matroids always possess a final polynomial as a consequence of an appropriate real version of Hilbert's Nullstellensatz. We discuss the more difficult problem of determining such final polynomials algorithmically. We introduce the notion of bi-quadratic final polynomials, and we show that finding them is equivalent to solving an LP-Problem. We apply a new theorem about symmetric oriented matroids to a series of cases of geometrical interest

Geometric Combinatorics of Transportation Polytopes and the Behavior of the Simplex Method

This dissertation investigates the geometric combinatorics of convex polytopes and connections to the behavior of the simplex method for linear programming. We focus our attention on transportation polytopes, which are sets of all tables of non-negative real numbers satisfying certain summation conditions. Transportation problems are, in many ways, the simplest kind of linear programs and thus have a rich combinatorial structure. First, we give new results on the diameters of certain classes of transportation polytopes and their relation to the Hirsch Conjecture, which asserts that the diameter of every $d$-dimensional convex polytope with $n$ facets is bounded above by $n-d$. In particular, we prove a new quadratic upper bound on the diameter of $3$-way axial transportation polytopes defined by $1$-marginals. We also show that the Hirsch Conjecture holds for $p \times 2$ classical transportation polytopes, but that there are infinitely-many Hirsch-sharp classical transportation polytopes. Second, we present new results on subpolytopes of transportation polytopes. We investigate, for example, a non-regular triangulation of a subpolytope of the fourth Birkhoff polytope $B_4$. This implies the existence of non-regular triangulations of all Birkhoff polytopes $B_n$ for $n \geq 4$. We also study certain classes of network flow polytopes and prove new linear upper bounds for their diameters.Comment: PhD thesis submitted June 2010 to the University of California, Davis. 183 pages, 49 figure