0xDE ([info]11011110) wrote,
@ 2008-05-07 14:27:00
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Entry tags:combinatorics, geometry

Open problems in polyhedral combinatorics
Gil Kalai lists five open questions about polyhedra. Two of them are ones I've worked on in a paper with Kuperberg and Ziegler:

(1) How big can the numbers of k-faces be in a polytope with n vertices and n facets? Gil asks the question for four-dimensional polytopes (where the issue is whether the numbers of edges and ridges can be larger than the numbers of vertices and facets by more than a constant factor) but the same question can be asked in any higher dimension. A simple construction forms polytopes with Omega(n^ceiling((d-1)/3))) intermediate-dimension faces and it's reasonable to hope that's the right answer. My paper with Kuperberg and Ziegler showed that there are cell complexes that look like 4-polytopes combinatorially and topologically but where the number of edges and vertices is large, but it's not obvious whether these complexes can be realized as polytopes.

(2) Are there polytopes that look simplicial in their low-dimensional faces and simple in their high dimensional faces? That is, all 2-faces should be triangles, all 3-faces tetrahedra, ..., and the same for the dual polytope. In the same paper, we showed that there are infinitely many 2-simple 2-simplicial 4-polytopes. Gil is asking for 5-simple 5-simplicial 10-polytopes.

Another of his questions, the one about whether centrally symmetric polytopes always have 3d or more faces, came up earlier in the comment threads of this post by Terry Tao.



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[info]nekura_ca
2008-05-08 04:18 am UTC (link)
I have a question that's sort of related to this: I've been searching for information about stradian measurment of polyhedron vertices. There are less then 100 matches on google, and most of them are people named Stradian, or to SI unit reference sheets. There is no reference to them on Mathworld, Wikipedia, or anywhere else that I can find. In fact, it took me almost a week just to find the term 'stradian' for a solid angle measurement. Can you point me to somewhere that I could find a list of the stradian measurements for vertices, or, better yet, a formula for calulating stradians from three angles that make up a simple vertex?

Thank you for your time, and a very interesting blog.

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[info]11011110
2008-05-08 04:40 am UTC (link)
You mean steradian, right? There's a formula here, though it's in terms of vertex positions rather than angles. I wouldn't be surprised if there are tables of these in Coxeter's Regular Polytopes, as well, but I can't check right now because my copy's in the office.

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[info]nekura_ca
2008-05-08 12:20 pm UTC (link)
*laughs* Yes, knowing the correct spelling makes it a whole lot easier to find infomation. The first time I found it, it was misspelled, so that was all I ever searched for. Thank you, and sorry for the silly question. ^_^

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