English

Resolving Stanley's conjecture on $k$-fold acyclic complexes

Combinatorics 2021-08-06 v3

Abstract

In 1993 Stanley showed that if a simplicial complex is acyclic over some field, then its face poset can be decomposed into disjoint rank 11 boolean intervals whose minimal faces together form a subcomplex. Stanley further conjectured that complexes with a higher notion of acyclicity could be decomposed in a similar way using boolean intervals of higher rank. We provide an explicit counterexample to this conjecture. We also prove a version of the conjecture for boolean trees and show that the original conjecture holds when this notion of acyclicity is as high as possible.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.08518,
  title  = {Resolving Stanley's conjecture on $k$-fold acyclic complexes},
  author = {Joseph Doolittle and Bennet Goeckner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.08518},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

15 pages, 2 figures, final version, added prop 3.6, fixed proof of lem 5.4, to appear in Combinatorial Theory

R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:22:50.487Z