English

A property of the Birkhoff polytope

Combinatorics 2018-07-02 v2 Group Theory Representation Theory

Abstract

The Birkhoff polytope BnB_n is the convex hull of all n×nn\times n permutation matrices in Rn×n\mathbb{R}^{n\times n}. We compute the combinatorial symmetry group of the Birkhoff polytope. A representation polytope is the convex hull of some finite matrix group GGL(d,R)G\leq \operatorname{GL}(d,\mathbb{R}). We show that the group of permutation matrices is essentially the only finite matrix group which yields a representation polytope with the same face lattice as the Birkhoff polytope.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1610.02077,
  title  = {A property of the Birkhoff polytope},
  author = {Barbara Baumeister and Frieder Ladisch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.02077},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

10 pages, pdflatex (with biblatex). v2: Simplified proof of Lemma 4.1, other minor corrections. Accepted for publication in "Algebraic Combinatorics"

R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:13:43.920Z