Decomposability of polytopes and polyhedra (Q1095408)

A polytope P is called decomposable if it is the algebraic sum of two non-trivial polytopes. Investigating the space of affine dependences (i.e. all vectors of coefficients summing to 0, and yielding a 0 linear combination) of the vertices of the dual polytope, several results concerning decomposability are obtained. E.g. for the case of 3-polytopes the following is shown: Let V and F denote the number of faces and vertices resp. of a 3-polytope P, then - if \(F<V\) then P is decomposable, - if \(F\geq 2V-6\) then P is not decomposable, - in all other cases both decomposable and non-decomposable P exist. For 4-polytopes an analogous inequality between the numbers of 0-, 1- and 3-faces is shown to imply decomposability.