The colorful simplicial depth of a collection of d+1 finite sets of points in Euclidean d-space is the number of choices of a point from each set such that the origin is contained in their convex hull. We use methods from combinatorial topology to prove a tight upper bound on the colorful simplicial depth. This implies a conjecture of Deza et al. (2006). Furthermore, we introduce colorful Gale transforms as a bridge between colorful configurations and Minkowski sums. Our colorful upper bound then yields a tight upper bound on the number of totally mixed facets of certain Minkowski sums of simplices. This resolves a conjecture of Burton (2003) in the theory of normal surfaces.
A catalogue of simplicial hyperplane arrangements was first given by Grunbaum in 1971. These arrangements naturally generalize finite Coxeter arrangements and the weak order through the poset of regions. For simplicial arrangements, posets of regions
are in fact lattices. We update Grunbaums catalogue, providing normals and invariants for all known sporadic simplicial arrangements with up to 37 lines. The weak order is known to be congruence normal, and congruence normality for simplicial arrangements can be determined using polyhedral cones called shards. In this article, we provide additional structure to the catalogue of simplicial hyperplane arrangements by determining which arrangements always/sometimes/never lead to congruence normal lattices of regions. To this end, we use oriented matroids to recast shards as covectors to determine congruence normality of large hyperplane arrangements. As a consequence of this approach we derive in particular which lattices of regions of sporadic simplicial arrangements of rank 3 are always congruence normal. We also show that lattices of regions from finite Weyl groupoids of any rank are congruence normal.
Interior and exterior angle vectors of polytopes capture curvature information at faces of all dimensions and can be seen as metric variants of $f$-vectors. In this context, Grams relation takes the place of the Euler-Poincare relation as the unique
linear relation among interior angles. We show the existence and uniqueness of Euler-Poincare-type relations for generalized angle vectors by building a bridge to the algebraic combinatorics of geometric lattices, generalizing work of Klivans-Swartz. We introduce flag-angles of polytopes as a geometric counterpart to flag-$f$-vectors. Flag-angles generalize the angle deficiencies of Descartes-Shephard, Grassmann angles, and spherical intrinsic volumes. Using the machinery of incidence algebras, we relate flag-angles of zonotopes to flag-$f$-vectors of graded posets. This allows us to determine the linear relations satisfied by interior/exterior flag-angle vectors.
A remarkable and important property of face numbers of simplicial polytopes is the generalized lower bound inequality, which says that the $h$-numbers of any simplicial polytope are unimodal. Recently, for balanced simplicial $d$-polytopes, that is s
implicial $d$-polytopes whose underlying graphs are $d$-colorable, Klee and Novik proposed a balanced analogue of this inequality, that is stronger than just unimodality. The aim of this article is to prove this conjecture of Klee and Novik. For this, we also show a Lefschetz property for rank-selected subcomplexes of balanced simplicial polytopes and thereby obtain new inequalities for their $h$-numbers.
We propose a continuous version of the classical Gale--Berlekamp switching game. We also study a weighted version of this new continuous game. The main results of this paper concern growth estimates for the corresponding optimization problems. The me
thods developed in this article are deterministic in nature and in some special cases the estimates obtained are optimal.