Combinatorial aspects of polytope slices
Author(s)
Li, Nan, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics.
Advisor
Richard P. Stanley.
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We studies two examples of polytope slices, hypersimplices as slices of hypercubes and edge polytopes. For hypersimplices, the main result is a proof of a conjecture by R. Stanley which gives an interpretation of the Ehrhart h*-vector in terms of descents and excedances. Our proof is geometric using a careful book-keeping of a shelling of a unimodular triangulation. We generalize this result to other closely related polytopes. We next study slices of edge polytopes. Let G be a finite connected simple graph with d vertices and let PG C Rd be the edge polytope of G. We call PG decomposable if PG decomposes into integral polytopes PG+ and PG- via a hyperplane, and we give an algorithm which determines the decomposability of an edge polytope. Based on a sequence of papers by Ohsugi and Hibi, we prove that when PG is decomposable, PG is normal if and only if both PG+ and PG- are normal. We also study toric ideals of PG, PG+ and PG-. This part is joint work with Hibi and Zhang.
Description
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mathematics, 2013. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (pages 69-70).
Date issued
2013Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of MathematicsPublisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Keywords
Mathematics.