Nonconvex embeddings of the exceptional simplicial 3-spheres with 8 vertices (Q1601422): Difference between revisions

Based on early work of M. Brückner (1909), in 1967 \textit{B. Grünbaum} and \textit{V. P. Sreedharan} [J. Comb. Theory 2, 437-465 (1967; Zbl 0156.43304)] completely enumerated the simplicial 4-polytopes with 8 vertices. They showed that there are 37 examples which can be realized as boundary complexes of convex 4-polytopes, while a further example of Brückner cannot be represented in this way. In 1969, D. Barnette found an additional non-polytopal 3-sphere with 8 vertices, later also proving that this list of altogether 39 spheres with 8 vertices is complete. Continuing this, the authors prove that the latter two 3-spheres are embeddable as geometric simplicial complexes into \(R^4\), but neither is convexly embeddable there. At the end of the paper, two conjectures are posed, one says that each shellable combinatorial simplicial \(d\)-sphere is embeddable in \(\mathbb{R}^{d+1}\).