Two signed associahedra (Q1269706): Difference between revisions

The associahedron is a spherical CW-complex whose faces relate to subdivisions of a convex polygon, or to the associative bracketings of a product. Such object appeared naturally in several areas of mathematics. An important property of the associahedron is that in fact it can be embedded as a convex polytope [see \textit{C. Lee}, Eur. J. Comb. 10, No. 6, 551-560 (1989; Zbl 0682.52004)]. In the original version the vertices of the associahedron are simply the triangulations of an \(n\)-gon, and the edges correspond to the exchange of an inner diagonal common between two triangulations that share all other diagonals. In this paper the authors present two generalizations of the associahedron, where the vertices of a triangulation are now signed and the adjacency between signed triangulations is not only via a diagonal flips but by a change of signs (see definitions for details). The main results regard the realizability of one of the generalizations as a convex polytope and of the other as a spherical CW-complex.