Combinatorial systolic inequalities

We establish combinatorial versions of various classical systolic inequalities. For a smooth triangulation of a closed smooth manifold, the minimal number of edges in a homotopically non-trivial loop contained in the $1$-skeleton gives an integer called the combinatorial systole. The number of top-dimensional simplices in the triangulation gives another integer called the combinatorial volume. We show that a class of smooth manifolds satisfies a systolic inequality for all Riemannian metrics if and only if it satisfies a corresponding combinatorial systolic inequality for all smooth triangulations. Along the way, we show that any closed Riemannian manifold has a smooth triangulation which "remembers" the geometry of the Riemannian metric, and conversely, that every smooth triangulation gives rise to Riemannian metrics which encode the combinatorics of the triangulation. We give a few applications of these results.