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TR-93-06
Lectures on Polytopes.
(1993)
These lecture notes have several aims: \begin{itemize} \item to give an introduction to some basic facts about convex polytopes, with an emphasis on the basic methods that yield them (Fourier-Motzkin elimination, Schlegel diagrams, shellability, Gale transforms and oriented matroids), \item to discuss some important examples and elegant constructions (cyclic and neighborly polytopes, zonotopes, Minkowski sums, permutahedra and associahedra, fiber polytopes, the Lawrence construction) \item and to illustrate why polytope theory is exciting, with highlights like Kalai's new diameter bounds, the construction of non-rational polytopes, the Bohne-Dress tiling theorem, shellability and the upper bound theorem, .... \end{itemize} For several of these topics the decisive break-through is very recent, which suggests that there is much more discovered.
SC-93-25
SC-93-11
Coxeter-associahedra.
(1993)
\def\KPA{\hbox{\rm KPA}}\def\A{{\rm A}}\def\KPW{\hbox{\rm KPW}}\def\W{{\rm W}}\def\B{{\rm B}} \def\D{{\rm D}} Recently M.~M.~Kapranov [Kap] defined a poset $\KPA_{n-1}$, called the {\it permuto-associahedron}, which is a hybrid between the face poset of the permutahedron and the associahedron. Its faces correspond to the partially parenthesized, ordered, partitions of the set $\{1,2,\ldots,n\}$, with a natural partial order. Kapranov showed that $\KPA_{n-1}$ is the face poset of a CW-ball, and explored its connection with a category-theoretic result of MacLane, Drinfeld's work on the Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equations, and a certain moduli space of curves. He also asked the question of whether this CW-ball can be realized as a convex polytope. We show that this permuto-associahedron corresponds to the type $\A_{n-1}$ in a family of convex polytopes $\KPW$ associated to each of the classical Coxeter groups, $\W = \A_{n-1}, \B_n, \D_n$. The embedding of these polytopes relies on the secondary polytope construction of the associahedron due to Gel'fand, Kapranov, and Zelevinsky. Our proofs yield integral coordinates, with all vertices on a sphere, and include a complete description of the facet-defining inequalities. Also we show that for each $\W$, the dual polytope $\KPW^*$ is a refinement (as a CW-complex) of the Coxeter complex associated to $\W$, and a coarsening of the barycentric subdivision of the Coxeter complex. In the case $\W=\A_{n-1}$, this gives an elementary proof of Kapranov's original sphericity result.