English

Sizing the White Whale

Combinatorics 2026-02-23 v1

Abstract

We propose a computational, convex hull free framework that takes advantage of the combinatorial structure of a zonotope, as for example its symmetry group, to orbitwise generate all canonical representatives of its vertices. We illustrate the proposed framework by generating all the 1 955 230 985 997 140 vertices of the 99-dimensional White Whale. We also compute the number of edges of this zonotope up to dimension 99 and exhibit a family of vertices whose degree is exponential in the dimension. The White Whale is the Minkowski sum of all the 2d12^d-1 non-zero 0/10/1-valued dd-dimensional vectors. The central hyperplane arrangement dual to the White Whale, made up of the hyperplanes normal to these vectors, is called the resonance arrangement and has been studied in various contexts including algebraic geometry, mathematical physics, economics, psychometrics, and representation theory.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.13309,
  title  = {Sizing the White Whale},
  author = {Antoine Deza and Mingfei Hao and Lionel Pournin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.13309},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

26 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:29:31.526Z