Counting inequivalent monotone Boolean functions

Monotone Boolean functions (MBFs) are Boolean functions $f: {0,1}^n \rightarrow {0,1}$ satisfying the monotonicity condition $x \leq y \Rightarrow f(x) \leq f(y)$ for any $x,y \in {0,1}^n$. The number of MBFs in n variables is known as the $n$th Dedekind number. It is a longstanding computational challenge to determine these numbers exactly - these values are only known for $n$ at most 8. Two monotone Boolean functions are inequivalent if one can be obtained from the other by renaming the variables. The number of inequivalent MBFs in $n$ variables was known only for up to $n = 6$. In this paper we propose a strategy to count inequivalent MBF's by breaking the calculation into parts based on the profiles of these functions. As a result we are able to compute the number of inequivalent MBFs in 7 variables. The number obtained is 490013148

Embedding a pair of graphs in a surface, and the width of 4-dimensional prismatoids

A prismatoid is a polytope with all its vertices contained in two parallel facets, called its bases. Its width is the number of steps needed to go from one base to the other in the dual graph. The first author recently showed that the existence of counter-examples to the Hirsch conjecture is equivalent to that of $d$-prismatoids of width larger than $d$, and constructed such prismatoids in dimension five. Here we show that the same is impossible in dimension four. This is proved by looking at the pair of graph embeddings on a 2-sphere that arise from the normal fans of the two bases.Comment: This paper merges and supersedes the papers arXiv:1101.3050 (of the last two authors) and arXiv:1102.2645 (of the first author

Colourful Simplicial Depth

Inspired by Barany's colourful Caratheodory theorem, we introduce a colourful generalization of Liu's simplicial depth. We prove a parity property and conjecture that the minimum colourful simplicial depth of any core point in any d-dimensional configuration is d^2+1 and that the maximum is d^(d+1)+1. We exhibit configurations attaining each of these depths and apply our results to the problem of bounding monochrome (non-colourful) simplicial depth.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figues. Minor polishin

Expected Crossing Numbers

The expected value for the weighted crossing number of a randomly weighted graph is studied. A variation of the Crossing Lemma for expectations is proved. We focus on the case where the edge-weights are independent random variables that are uniformly distributed on [0,1].Comment: 14 page

On the Grone-Merris conjecture

Grone and Merris [GM94] conjectured that the Laplacian spectrum of a graph is majorized by its conjugate vertex degree sequence. We prove that this conjecture holds for a class of graphs including trees. We also show that this conjecture and its generalization to graphs with Dirichlet boundary conditions are equivalent