A spectral method for concordant polyhedral faces (Q1180392)

The paper develops a systematic and algorithmic application of D. G. Higman's theory of coherent configurations to determine the dimension of a polytope. In section 3 the authors show, that this program can be carried through by determining the spectral structure, especially the eigenvalues of the \(\{0,1\}\)-valued incidence matrices \(B\) of a certain relation \(R\), which is essentially the vertex-facets incidence relation. These algebraic manipulations work in principle for all polytopes. However, while working practically for some the algebraic manipulations are too cumbersome for others. Therefore, in section 4 the authors introduce a new method relying on a completely reduced form of \(\mathcal B\), where \(\mathcal B\) is the algebra of complex linear combinations of the incidence matrices \(B_ i\) of section 3. Sections 5, 6 give, as an example, the application of the methods to the clique partition scheme. The clique partition scheme can be generalized to uniform hypergraphs. In section 7 the authors extend their applications to these structures. Appendix A gives a list of parameters of the clique partition scheme. Appendix B describes the special structure of 6 pairwise orthogonal matrices \({\mathcal E}_ i\) associated with the clique scheme according to the methods developed in section 4.