Related papers: Shellability is hard even for balls
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…
We show that the problem of determining whether a knot in the 3-sphere is non-trivial lies in NP. This is a consequence of the following more general result. The problem of determining whether the Thurston norm of a second homology class in…
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…
Durhuus and Jonsson (1995) introduced the class of "locally constructible" (LC) 3-spheres and showed that there are only exponentially-many combinatorial types of simplicial LC 3-spheres. Such upper bounds are crucial for the convergence of…
Nevo, Santos, and Wilson constructed $2^{\Omega(N^d)}$ combinatorially distinct simplicial $(2d-1)$-spheres with $N$ vertices. We prove that all spheres produced by one of their methods are shellable. Combining this with prior results of…
A triangulation of a $3$-manifold can be shown to be homeomorphic to the $3$-sphere by describing a discrete Morse function on it with only two critical faces, that is, a sequence of elementary collapses from the triangulation with one…
We prove the computational intractability of rotating and placing $n$ square tiles into a $1 \times n$ array such that adjacent tiles are compatible--either equal edge colors, as in edge-matching puzzles, or matching tab/pocket shapes, as…
The triangulation complexity of a closed orientable 3-manifold is the minimal number of tetrahedra in any triangulation of the manifold. The main theorem of the paper gives upper and lower bounds on the triangulation complexity of any…
In this article, we prove that the commensurability class of a closed, orientable, hyperbolic 3-manifold is determined by the surface subgroups of its fundamental group. Moreover, we prove that there can be only finitely many closed,…
Following D.B. Karaguezian, V. Reiner, and M.L. Wachs (Matching Complexes, Bounded Degree Graph Complexes, and Weight Spaces of $GL$-Complexes, Journal of Algebra 2001) we study the connectivity degree and shellability of multiple…
We consider a $q$-analogue of abstract simplicial complexes, called $q$-complexes, and discuss the notion of shellability for such complexes. It is shown that $q$-complexes formed by independent subspaces of a $q$-matroid are shellable.…
We show that {\sc Heegaard Genus $\leq g$}, the problem of deciding whether a triangulated 3-manifold admits a Heegaard splitting of genus less than or equal to $g$, is NP-hard. The result follows from a quadratic time reduction of the…
We complete the explicit study of a three-fold divisorial contraction whose exceptional divisor contracts to a point, by treating the case where the point downstairs is a singularity of index $n \ge 2$. We prove that if this singularity is…
The notions Golodness and tightness for simplicial complexes come from algebra and geometry, respectively. We prove these two notions are equivalent for 3-manifold triangulations, through a topological characterization of a polyhedral…
We prove that given two compact oriented $3$-manifolds $N$ and $M,$ with $M$ satisfying only a mild hypothesis, there is a hyperbolic $3$-manifold $N'$ arbitrarily ``closely related'' to $N,$ and such that $N'$ does not embed in $M.$ For…
We discuss the computational complexity of special cases of the 3-dimensional (axial) assignment problem where the elements are points in a Cartesian space and where the cost coefficients are the perimeters of the corresponding triangles…
We compute for all orientable irreducible geometric 3-manifolds certain complexity functions that approximate from above Matveev's natural complexity, known to be equal to the minimal number of tetrahedra in a triangulation. We can show…
After [J.Herzog, D.Popescu, Finite filtrations of modules and shellable multicomplexes, Preprint IMAR no 4/2005, Bucharest, 2005], the shellability of multicomplexes $\Gamma$ is given in terms of some special faces of $\Gamma$ called…
We define an invariant, which we call surface-complexity, of closed 3-manifolds by means of Dehn surfaces. The surface-complexity of a manifold is a natural number measuring how much the manifold is complicated. We prove that it fulfils…
Building on the results published in arxiv:2004.12849 we present a general framework for demonstrating the NP-hardness of satisfying many genres of loop and path puzzles using a 'T-metacell' gadget. We then use this to prove the…