Parity representations of posets (Q2032856): Difference between revisions

A \textit{parity representation} of a ranked poset \(P\) is a mapping \(f:P\to \mathbb Z^{d }\) that maps each chain of \(P\) to the vertex set of a unimodular simplex in such a way that the collection of simplexes so obtained forms a geometric cell complex in \(\mathbb R^{d}\), with \(f\) also satisfying the conditions \begin{itemize} \item[(i)] if \(x,y\in P\) and \(x\le y\), then the set of indices of odd components of \(f(x)\) is a subset of that of \(y\), and \item[(ii)] the rank of \(x\in P\) equals the number of odd components of \(f(x)\). \end{itemize} We denote the poset of all intervals of a poset \(P\) and the poset of all nonempty intervals of \(P\) by \(\mathcal I(P)\) and \(\mathcal J(P)\), respectively. The main result of the paper is that, if \(P\) is a ranked poset with given parity representation, then there is a canonically associated parity representation of the ranked poset \(\mathcal J(P)\); see Theorem 4.1. There is also an analogous result for the poset \(\mathcal I(P)\); see Theorem 4.3. Given a finite (ranked) poset \(P\) and a nonnegative integer \(k\), we denote by \(\mathcal J^{k}(P)\) the result of \(k\) iterations of \(\mathcal J\); here \(\mathcal J^{0}(P)\) is \(P\). Enumeration of the elements of \(\mathcal J^{k}(P)\) and connections to Ehrhart polynomials are also discussed in the paper (Theorem 5.1).