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Category Archives: Open problems
Telling a Simple Polytope From its Graph
Peter Mani (a photograph by Emo Welzl) Simple polytopes, puzzles Micha A. Perles conjectured in the ’70s that the graph of a simple -polytope determines the entire combinatorial structure of the polytope. This conjecture was proved in 1987 by Blind … Continue reading
Posted in Convex polytopes, Open problems
Tagged Eric Friedman, Peter Mani, Roswitta Blind
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Lovasz’s Two Families Theorem
Laci and Kati This is the first of a few posts which are spin-offs of the extremal combinatorics series, especially of part III. Here we talk about Lovasz’s geometric two families theorem. 1. Lovasz’s two families theorem Here … Continue reading
Posted in Combinatorics, Convexity, Open problems
Tagged exterior algebras, Extremal combinatorics, shellability
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Seven Problems Around Tverberg’s Theorem
Imre Barany, Rade Zivaljevic, Helge Tverberg, and Sinisa Vrecica Recall the beautiful theorem of Tverberg: (We devoted two posts (I, II) to its background and proof.) Tverberg Theorem (1965): Let be points in , . Then there is a partition of … Continue reading
A Diameter Problem (6): Abstract Objective Functions
George Dantzig and Leonid Khachyan In this part we will not progress on the diameter problem that we discussed in the earlier posts but will rather describe a closely related problem for directed graphs associated with ordered families of sets. The role models for … Continue reading
Posted in Combinatorics, Convex polytopes, Open problems
Tagged Hirsch conjecture, Linear programming
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Extremal Combinatorics IV: Shifting
Compression We describe now a nice proof technique called “shifting” or “compression” and mention a few more problems. The Sauer-Shelah Lemma: Let . Recall that a family shatters a set if for every there is such that … Continue reading
Extremal Combinatorics III: Some Basic Theorems
. Shattering Let us return to extremal problems for families of sets and describe several basic theorems and basic open problems. In the next part we will discuss a nice proof technique called “shifting” or “compression.” The Sauer-Shelah (-Perles -Vapnik-Chervonenkis) Lemma: (Here we write .) … Continue reading
A Diameter Problem (5)
6. First subexponential bounds. Proposition 1: How to prove it: This is easy to prove: Given two sets and in our family , we first find a path of the form where, and . We let with and consider the family … Continue reading
Diameter Problem (4)
Let us consider another strategy to deal with our diameter problem. Let us try to associate other graphs to our family of sets. Recall that we consider a family of subsets of size of the set . Let us now associate … Continue reading
Diameter Problem (3)
3. What we will do in this post and and in future posts We will now try all sorts of ideas to give good upper bounds for the abstract diameter problem that we described. As we explained, such bounds apply … Continue reading
Posted in Combinatorics, Convex polytopes, Open problems
Tagged Hirsch conjecture, Linear programming, Quasi-automated proofs
1 Comment
A Diameter Problem (2)
2. The connection with Hirsch’s Conjecture The Hirsch Conjecture asserts that the diameter of the graph G(P) of a d-polytope P with n facets is at most n-d. Not even a polynomial upper bound for the diameter in terms of d and … Continue reading
Posted in Combinatorics, Convex polytopes, Open problems
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