arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Lionel Pournin.
We study a family of polytopes and their duals, that appear in various optimization problems as the unit balls for certain norms. These two families interpolate between the hypercube, the unit ball for the $\infty$-norm, and its dual cross-polytope, the unit ball for the $1$-norm. We give combinatorial and geometric properties of both families of polytopes such as their $f$-vector, their volume, and the volume of their boundary.
A point in the $d$-dimensional integer lattice $\mathbb{Z}^d$ is primitive when its coordinates are relatively prime. Two primitive points are multiples of one another when they are opposite, and for this reason, we consider half of the primitive points within the lattice, the ones whose first non-zero coordinate is positive. We solve the packing problem that asks for the largest possible number of such points whose absolute values of any given coordinate sum to at most a fixed integer $k$. We present several consequences of this result at the intersection of geometry, number theory, and combinatorics. In particular, we obtain an explicit expression for the largest possible diameter of a lattice zonotope contained in the hypercube $[0,k]^d$ and, conjecturally of any lattice polytope in that hypercube.
A class of counting problems ask for the number of regions of a central hyperplane arrangement. By duality, this is the same as counting the vertices of a zonotope. We give several efficient algorithms, based on a linear optimization oracle, that solve this and related enumeration problems. More precisely, our algorithms compute the vertices of a zonotope from the set of its generators and inversely, recover the generators of a zonotope from its vertices. A variation of the latter algorithm also allows to decide whether a polytope, given as its vertex set, is a zonotope and when it is not, to compute its greatest zonotopal summand.
We establish sharp asymptotic estimates for the diameter of primitive zonotopes when their dimension is fixed. We also prove that, for infinitely many integers $k$, the largest possible diameter of a lattice zonotope contained in the hypercube $[0,k]^d$ is uniquely achieved by a primitive zonotope. As a consequence, we obtain that this largest diameter grows like $k^{d/(d+1)}$ up to an explicit multiplicative constant, when $d$ is fixed and $k$ goes to infinity, providing a new lower bound on the largest possible diameter of a lattice polytope contained in $[0,k]^d$.
We introduce a graph structure on Euclidean polytopes. The vertices of this graph are the $d$-dimensional polytopes contained in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and its edges connect any two polytopes that can be obtained from one another by either inserting or deleting a vertex, while keeping their vertex sets otherwise unaffected. We prove several results on the connectivity of this graph, and on a number of its subgraphs. We are especially interested in several families of subgraphs induced by lattice polytopes, such as the subgraphs induced by the lattice polytopes with $n$ or $n+1$ vertices, that turn out to exhibit intriguing properties.
The flip-graph of a convex polygon $π$ is the graph whose vertices are the triangulations of $π$ and whose edges correspond to flips between them. The eccentricity of a triangulation $T$ of $π$ is the largest possible distance in this graph from $T$ to any triangulation of $π$. It is well known that, when all $n-3$ interior edges of $T$ are incident to the same vertex, the eccentricity of $T$ in the flip-graph of $π$ is exactly $n-3$, where $n$ denotes the number of vertices of $π$. Here, this statement is generalized to arbitrary triangulations. Denoting by $n-3-k$ the largest number of interior edges of $T$ incident to a vertex, it is shown that the eccentricity of $T$ in the flip-graph of $π$ is exactly $n-3+k$, provided $k\leq{n/2-2}$. Inversely, the eccentricity of a triangulation, when small enough, allows to recover the value of $k$. More precisely, if $k\leq{n/8-5/2}$, it is also shown that $T$ has eccentricity $n-3+k$ if and only if exactly $n-3-k$ of its interior edges are incident to a given vertex. When $k>n/2-2$, bounds on the eccentricity of $T$ are also given and discussed.
We investigate how the Minkowski sum of two polytopes affects their graph and, in particular, their diameter. We show that the diameter of the Minkowski sum is bounded below by the diameter of each summand and above by, roughly, the product between the diameter of one summand and the number of vertices of the other. We also prove that both bounds are sharp. In addition, we obtain a result on polytope decomposability. More precisely, given two polytopes P and Q, we show that P can be written as a Minkowski sum with a summand homothetic to Q if and only if P has the same number of vertices as its Minkowski sum with Q.
We show that the largest possible diameter $δ(d,k)$ of a $d$-dimensional polytope whose vertices have integer coordinates ranging between $0$ and $k$ is at most $kd-\lceil2d/3\rceil$ when $k\geq3$. In addition, we show that $δ(4,3)=8$. This substantiates the conjecture whereby $δ(d,k)$ is at most $\lfloor(k+1)d/2\rfloor$ and is achieved by a Minkowski sum of lattice vectors.
We explore several families of flip-graphs, all related to polygons or punctured polygons. In particular, we consider the topological flip-graphs of once-punctured polygons which, in turn, contain all possible geometric flip-graphs of polygons with a marked point as embedded sub-graphs. Our main focus is on the geometric properties of these graphs and how they relate to one another. In particular, we show that the embeddings between them are strongly convex (or, said otherwise, totally geodesic). We also find bounds on the diameters of these graphs, sometimes using the strongly convex embeddings. Finally, we show how these graphs relate to different polytopes, namely type D associahedra and a family of secondary polytopes which we call pointihedra.
We study flip-graphs of triangulations on topological surfaces where distance is measured by counting the number of necessary flip operations between two triangulations. We focus on surfaces of positive genus $g$ with a single boundary curve and $n$ marked points on this curve; we consider triangulations up to homeomorphism with the marked points as their vertices. Our main results are upper and lower bounds on the maximal distance between triangulations depending on $n$ and can be thought of as bounds on the diameter of flip-graphs up to the quotient of underlying homeomorphism groups. The main results assert that the diameter of these quotient graphs grows at least like $5n/2$ for all $g\geq 1$. Our upper bounds grow at most like $[4 -1/(4g)]n$ for $g\geq 2$, and at most like $23n/8 $ for the torus.
It is shown here that the diameter of the $d$-dimensional cyclohedron is not greater than $\lceil 5d/2\rceil-2$. It is also shown that the $5/2$ coefficient in this upper bound is asymptotically sharp. More precisely, the $d$-dimensional cyclohedron has diameter at least $5d/2-4\sqrt{d}-4$.
This paper is about the geometry of flip-graphs associated to triangulations of surfaces. More precisely, we consider a topological surface with a privileged boundary curve and study the spaces of its triangulations with n vertices on the boundary curve. The surfaces we consider topologically fill this boundary curve so we call them filling surfaces. The associated flip-graphs are infinite whenever the mapping class group of the surface (the group of self-homeomorphisms up to isotopy) is infinite, and we can obtain moduli spaces of flip-graphs by considering the flip-graphs up to the action of the mapping class group. This always results in finite graphs and we are interested in their geometry. Our main focus is on the diameter growth of these graphs as n increases. We obtain general estimates that hold for all topological types of filling surface. We find more precise estimates for certain families of filling surfaces and obtain asymptotic growth results for several of them. In particular, we find the exact diameter of modular flip-graphs when the filling surface is a cylinder with a single vertex on the non-privileged boundary curve.
It is proven here that the diameter of the d-dimensional associahedron is 2d-4 when d is greater than 9. Two maximally distant vertices of this polytope are explicitly described as triangulations of a convex polygon, and their distance is obtained using combinatorial arguments. This settles two problems posed about twenty-five years ago by Daniel Sleator, Robert Tarjan, and William Thurston.
Flip-graph connectedness is established here for the vertex set of the 4-dimensional cube. It is found as a consequence that this vertex set has 92 487 256 triangulations, partitioned into 247 451 symmetry classes.