English

On positivity of Ehrhart polynomials

Combinatorics 2018-09-05 v2

Abstract

Ehrhart discovered that the function that counts the number of lattice points in dilations of an integral polytope is a polynomial. We call the coefficients of this polynomial Ehrhart coefficients, and say a polytope is Ehrhart positive if all Ehrhart coefficients are positive (which is not true for all integral polytopes). The main purpose of this article is to survey interesting families of polytopes that are known to be Ehrhart positive and discuss the reasons from which their Ehrhart positivity follows. We also include examples of polytopes that have negative Ehrhart coefficients and polytopes that are conjectured to be Ehrhart positive, as well as pose a few relevant questions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.09962,
  title  = {On positivity of Ehrhart polynomials},
  author = {Fu Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.09962},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

40 pages, 7 figures. To appear in in Recent Trends in Algebraic Combinatorics, a volume of the Association for Women in Mathematics Series, Springer International Publishing

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:58:34.084Z