English

The width of 5-dimensional prismatoids

Combinatorics 2015-09-22 v2

Abstract

Santos' construction of counter-examples to the Hirsch Conjecture (2012) is based on the existence of prismatoids of dimension d of width greater than d. Santos, Stephen and Thomas (2012) have shown that this cannot occur in d4d \le 4. Motivated by this we here study the width of 5-dimensional prismatoids, obtaining the following results: - There are 5-prismatoids of width six with only 25 vertices, versus the 48 vertices in Santos' original construction. This leads to non-Hirsch polytopes of dimension 20, rather than the original dimension 43. - There are 5-prismatoids with nn vertices and width Ω(n)\Omega(\sqrt{n}) for arbitrarily large nn. Hence, the width of 5-prismatoids is unbounded.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1202.4701,
  title  = {The width of 5-dimensional prismatoids},
  author = {Benjamin Matschke and Francisco Santos and Christophe Weibel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1202.4701},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

31 pages, 10 figures. Changes from v1: the introduction has been edited, and a minor correction made in the statement of Proposition 1.5

R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:22:59.423Z