We develop a geometric framework that unifies several different combinatorial
fixed-point theorems related to Tucker's lemma and Sperner's lemma, showing
them to be different geometric manifestations of the same topological
phenomena. In doing so, we obtain (1) new Tucker-like and Sperner-like
fixed-point theorems involving an exponential-sized label set; (2) a
generalization of Fan's parity proof of Tucker's Lemma to a much broader class
of label sets; and (3) direct proofs of several Sperner-like lemmas from
Tucker's lemma via explicit geometric embeddings, without the need for
topological fixed-point theorems. Our work naturally suggests several
interesting open questions for future research.Comment: 10 pages; an extended abstract appeared at Eurocomb 201