Related papers: Subdivisions, shellability, and collapsibility of …

The main goal of this paper is to show that shellability is NP-hard for triangulated d-balls (this also gives hardness for triangulated d-manifolds/d-pseudomanifolds with boundary) as soon as d is at least 3. This extends our earlier work…

The shellability of the boundary complex of an unbounded polyhedron is investigated. To this end, it is necessary to pass to a suitable compactification, e.g., by one point. This observation can be exploited to prove that any tropical…

Hypersimplices are well-studied objects in combinatorics, optimization, and representation theory. For each hypersimplex, we define a new family of subpolytopes, called r-stable hypersimplices, and show that a well-known regular unimodular…

We construct the first explicit example of a simplicial 3-ball B_{15,66} that is not collapsible. It has only 15 vertices. We exhibit a second 3-ball B_{12,38} with 12 vertices that is collapsible and evasive, but not shellable. Finally, we…

We disprove a long-standing open conjecture due to Simon stating that all skeleta of simplices are extendably shellable. In particular, for every $d \geq 3$ we provide a pure $d$-dimensional shellable simplicial complex which is not…

Imposing a strong condition on the linear order of shellable complexes, we introduce strong shellability. Basic properties, including the existence of dimension-decreasing strong shelling orders, are developed with respect to nonpure…

Let L be a lattice admitting a left-modular chain of length r, not necessarily maximal. We show that if either L is graded or the chain is modular, then the (r-2)-skeleton of L is vertex-decomposable (hence shellable). This proves a…

Problem 4.19 in Ziegler's "Lectures on Polytopes" asserts that every simple $3$-dimensional polytope has the property that its dual can be constructed as the convex hull of a subset of the vertices of the original simple polytope. In this…

We construct examples of embedded flexible cross-polytopes in the spheres of all dimensions. These examples are interesting from two points of view. First, in dimensions 4 and higher, they are the first examples of embedded flexible…

We recently defined a property of Morse shellability (and tileability) of finite simplicial complexes which extends the classical one and its relations with discrete Morse theory. We now prove that the product of two Morse tileable or…

In 1967, Chillingworth proved that all convex simplicial 3-balls are collapsible. Using the classical notion of tightness, we generalize this to arbitrary manifolds: We show that all tight simplicial 3-manifolds admit some perfect discrete…

A classical question in PL topology, asked among others by Hudson, Lickorish, and Kirby, is whether every linear subdivision of the d-simplex is simplicially collapsible. The answer is known to be positive for d<4. We solve the problem up…

We introduce the class of linearly shellable pure simplicial complexes. The characterizing property is the existence of a labeling of their vertices such that all linear extensions of the Bruhat order on the set of facets are shelling…

The construction of the Bier sphere Bier(K) for a simplicial complex K is due to Bier. Bj\"orner, Paffenholz, Sj\"ostrand and Ziegler generalize this construction to obtain a Bier poset Bier(P,I) from any bounded poset P and any proper…

The question of shellability of complexes of directed trees was asked by R. Stanley. D. Kozlov showed that the existence of a complete source in a directed graph provides a shelling of its complex of directed trees. We will show that this…

We say that a pure $d$-dimensional simplicial complex $\Delta$ on $n$ vertices is \emph{shelling completable} if $\Delta$ can be realized as the initial sequence of some shelling of $\Delta_{n-1}^{(d)}$, the $d$-skeleton of the…

Cannon, Swenson, and others have proved numerous theorems about subdivision rules associated to hyperbolic groups with a 2-sphere at infinity. However, few explicit examples are known. We construct an explicit subdivision rule for many…

We prove that for every $d\geq 2$, deciding if a pure, $d$-dimensional, simplicial complex is shellable is NP-hard, hence NP-complete. This resolves a question raised, e.g., by Danaraj and Klee in 1978. Our reduction also yields that for…

We show that a compact n-polyhedron PL embeds in a product of n trees if and only if it collapses onto an (n-1)-polyhedron. If the n-polyhedron is contractible and n\ne 3 (or n=3 and the Andrews-Curtis Conjecture holds), the product of…

In this thesis, we use normal surface theory to understand certain properties of minimal triangulations of compact orientable 3-manifolds. We describe the collapsing process of normal 2-spheres and disks. Using some geometrical…