Related papers: Hirsch polytopes with exponentially long combinato…
The Hirsch conjecture, posed in 1957, stated that the graph of a $d$-dimensional polytope or polyhedron with $n$ facets cannot have diameter greater than $n - d$. The conjecture itself has been disproved, but what we know about the…
We introduce a new combinatorial abstraction for the graphs of polyhedra. The new abstraction is a flexible framework defined by combinatorial properties, with each collection of properties taken providing a variant for studying the…
Using an intuition from metric geometry, we prove that any flag and normal simplicial complex satisfies the non-revisiting path conjecture. As a consequence, the diameter of its facet-ridge graph is smaller than the number of vertices minus…
This dissertation investigates the geometric combinatorics of convex polytopes and connections to the behavior of the simplex method for linear programming. We focus our attention on transportation polytopes, which are sets of all tables of…
In this paper we introduce the circuit diameter of polyhedra, which is always bounded from above by the combinatorial diameter. We consider dual transportation polyhedra defined on general bipartite graphs. For complete $M{\times}N$…
From the point of view of optimization, a critical issue is relating the combinatorial diameter of a polyhedron to its number of facets $f$ and dimension $d$. In the seminal paper of Klee and Walkup [KW67], the Hirsch conjecture of an upper…
We introduce topological prismatoids, a combinatorial abstraction of the (geometric) prismatoids recently introduced by the second author to construct counter-examples to the Hirsch conjecture. We show that the `strong $d$-step Theorem'…
We consider an interesting class of combinatorial symmetries of polytopes which we call \emph{edge-length preserving combinatorial symmetries}. These symmetries not only preserve the combinatorial structure of a polytope but also map each…
We consider the question of the largest possible combinatorial diameter among $(d-1)$-dimensional simplicial complexes on $n$ vertices, denoted $H_s(n, d)$. Using a probabilistic construction we give a new lower bound on $H_s(n, d)$ that is…
Bisztriczky defines a multiplex as a generalization of a simplex, and an ordinary polytope as a generalization of a cyclic polytope. This paper presents results concerning the combinatorics of multiplexes and ordinary polytopes. The flag…
This paper considers the question of how to succinctly approximate a multidimensional convex body by a polytope. Given a convex body $K$ of unit diameter in Euclidean $d$-dimensional space (where $d$ is a constant) and an error parameter…
Finding a good bound on the maximal edge diameter $\Delta(d,n)$ of a polytope in terms of its dimension $d$ and the number of its facets $n$ is one of the basic open questions in polytope theory \cite{BG}. Although some bounds are known,…
The theory of limits of discrete combinatorial objects has been thriving for the last decade or so. The syntactic, algebraic approach to the subject is popularly known as "flag algebras", while the semantic, geometric one is often…
Kim defined a very general combinatorial abstraction of the diameter of polytopes called subset partition graphs to study how certain combinatorial properties of such graphs may be achieved in lower bound constructions. Using Lov\'asz'…
The investigation of combinatorial diameters of polyhedra is a classical topic in linear programming due to its connection with the possibility of an efficient pivot rule for the simplex method. We are interested in the diameters of…
Motivated by the problem of bounding the number of iterations of the Simplex algorithm we investigate the possible lengths of monotone paths followed by the Simplex method inside the oriented graphs of polyhedra (oriented by the objective…
The study of the diameter of the graph of polyhedra is a classical problem in the theory of linear programming. While transportation polytopes are at the core of operations research and statistics it is still open whether the Hirsch…
Approximating convex bodies succinctly by convex polytopes is a fundamental problem in discrete geometry. A convex body $K$ of diameter $\mathrm{diam}(K)$ is given in Euclidean $d$-dimensional space, where $d$ is a constant. Given an error…
A simplicial complex $\Delta$ is called flag if all minimal nonfaces of $\Delta$ have at most two elements. The following are proved: First, if $\Delta$ is a flag simplicial pseudomanifold of dimension $d-1$, then the graph of $\Delta$ (i)…
The Hirsch Conjecture (1957) stated that the graph of a $d$-dimensional polytope with $n$ facets cannot have (combinatorial) diameter greater than $n-d$. That is, that any two vertices of the polytope can be connected by a path of at most…