Simplices rarely contain their circumcenter in high dimensions

summary:Acute triangles are defined by having all angles less than $\pi /2$, and are characterized as the triangles containing their circumcenter in the interior. For simplices of dimension $n\geq 3$, acuteness is defined by demanding that all dihedral angles between $(n-1)$-dimensional faces are smaller than $\pi /2$. However, there are, in a practical sense, too few acute simplices in general. This is unfortunate, since the acuteness property provides good qualitative features for finite element methods. The property of acuteness is logically independent of the property of containing the circumcenter when the dimension is greater than two. In this article, we show that the latter property is also quite rare in higher dimensions. In a natural probability measure on the set of $n$-dimensional simplices, we show that the probability that a uniformly random $n$-simplex contains its circumcenter is $1/2^n$

Lines pinning lines

A line g is a transversal to a family F of convex polytopes in 3-dimensional space if it intersects every member of F. If, in addition, g is an isolated point of the space of line transversals to F, we say that F is a pinning of g. We show that any minimal pinning of a line by convex polytopes such that no face of a polytope is coplanar with the line has size at most eight. If, in addition, the polytopes are disjoint, then it has size at most six. We completely characterize configurations of disjoint polytopes that form minimal pinnings of a line.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figure

A Dihedral Acute Triangulation of the Cube

It is shown that there exists a dihedral acute triangulation of the three-dimensional cube. The method of constructing the acute triangulation is described, and symmetries of the triangulation are discussed.Comment: Minor edits for journal version. Added some material to the introductio

A Geometric Toolbox for Tetrahedral Finite Element Partitions

In this work we present a survey of some geometric results on tetrahedral partitions and their refinements in a unified manner. They can be used for mesh generation and adaptivity in practical calculations by the finite element method (FEM), and also in theoretical finite element (FE) analysis. Special emphasis is laid on the correspondence between relevant results and terminology used in FE computations, and those established in the area of discrete and computational geometry (DCG)

On nonobtuse refinements of tetrahedral finite element meshes

It is known that piecewise linear continuous finite element (FE) approximations on nonobtuse tetrahedral FE meshes guarantee the validity of discrete analogues of various maximum principles for a wide class of elliptic problems of the second order. Such analogues are often called discrete maximum principles (or DMPs in short). In this work we present several global and local refinement techniques which produce nonobtuse conforming (i.e. face-to-face) tetrahedral partitions of polyhedral domains. These techniques can be used in order to compute more accurate FE approximations (on finer and/or adapted tetrahedral meshes) still satisfying DMPs

Coxeter groups, quiver mutations and geometric manifolds

We construct finite volume hyperbolic manifolds with large symmetry groups. The construction makes use of the presentations of finite Coxeter groups provided by Barot and Marsh, and involves mutations of quivers and diagrams defined in the theory of cluster algebras. We generalize our construction by assigning to every quiver or diagram of finite or affine type a CW-complex with a proper action of a finite (or affine) Coxeter group. These CW-complexes undergo mutations agreeing with mutations of quivers and diagrams. We also generalize the construction to quivers and diagrams originating from unpunctured surfaces and orbifolds