The Completeness of Propositional Resolution: A Simple and Constructive<br> Proof

It is well known that the resolution method (for propositional logic) is complete. However, completeness proofs found in the literature use an argument by contradiction showing that if a set of clauses is unsatisfiable, then it must have a resolution refutation. As a consequence, none of these proofs actually gives an algorithm for producing a resolution refutation from an unsatisfiable set of clauses. In this note, we give a simple and constructive proof of the completeness of propositional resolution which consists of an algorithm together with a proof of its correctness.Comment: 7 pages, submitted to LMC

Remarks on the Cayley Representation of Orthogonal Matrices and on Perturbing the Diagonal of a Matrix to Make it Invertible

This note contains two remarks. The first remark concerns the extension of the well-known Cayley representation of rotation matrices by skew symmetric matrices to rotation matrices admitting -1 as an eigenvalue and then to all orthogonal matrices. We review a method due to Hermann Weyl and another method involving multiplication by a diagonal matrix whose entries are +1 or -1. The second remark has to do with ways of flipping the signs of the entries of a diagonal matrix, C, with nonzero diagonal entries, obtaining a new matrix, E, so that E + A is invertible, where A is any given matrix (invertible or not).Comment: 7 page

Fast and Simple Methods For Computing Control Points

The purpose of this paper is to present simple and fast methods for computing control points for polynomial curves and polynomial surfaces given explicitly in terms of polynomials (written as sums of monomials). We give recurrence formulae w.r.t. arbitrary affine frames. As a corollary, it is amusing that we can also give closed-form expressions in the case of the frame (r, s) for curves, and the frame ((1, 0, 0), (0, 1, 0), (0, 0, 1) for surfaces. Our methods have the same low polynomial (time and space) complexity as the other best known algorithms, and are very easy to implement.Comment: 15 page

Notes on Convex Sets, Polytopes, Polyhedra, Combinatorial Topology, Voronoi Diagrams and Delaunay Triangulations

Some basic mathematical tools such as convex sets, polytopes and combinatorial topology, are used quite heavily in applied fields such as geometric modeling, meshing, computer vision, medical imaging and robotics. This report may be viewed as a tutorial and a set of notes on convex sets, polytopes, polyhedra, combinatorial topology, Voronoi Diagrams and Delaunay Triangulations. It is intended for a broad audience of mathematically inclined readers. I have included a rather thorough treatment of the equivalence of V-polytopes and H-polytopes and also of the equivalence of V-polyhedra and H-polyhedra, which is a bit harder. In particular, the Fourier-Motzkin elimination method (a version of Gaussian elimination for inequalities) is discussed in some detail. I also included some material on projective spaces, projective maps and polar duality w.r.t. a nondegenerate quadric in order to define a suitable notion of ``projective polyhedron'' based on cones. To the best of our knowledge, this notion of projective polyhedron is new. We also believe that some of our proofs establishing the equivalence of V-polyhedra and H-polyhedra are new.Comment: 183 page