Flow polytopes and the graph of reflexive polytopes (Q1044972)

Motivated by the problem of constructing reflexive polytopes the authors introduce a graph whose set of vertices is the set of reflexive \(d\)-polytopes in \(d\)-space and whose edges can be found computationally without much difficulty. For dimensions 2 and 3, this graph is explicitly computed, and its connected components are determined. The results of the computations are reported at the end of the paper. Particular attention is paid to the reflexive polytopes among the ``flow polytopes'' with the hope that these easily computable polytopes would be scattered among the connected components of the graph, thereby yielding a way to find all or most of the reflexive polytopes. A method is devised for constructing reflexive flow polytopes. As it happens, in dimension 2, in which the graph has a connected component of 15 vertices and one additional isolated vertex, the isolated vertex is not among the five flow polytopes; and in dimension 3, the 39 flow polytopes are restricted to two of the 1056 connected components.