On valences of polyhedra (Q1180555)

The paper refers to special polyhedral cell-complexes. More precisely, let a polyhedral map be a 2-dimensional cell-complex whose underlying point set is a topological manifold in \(\mathbb{R}^d\) which can be orientable or non-orientable. (With respect to special underlying point sets, one might use the notions polyhedral spheres, polyhedral tori etc..) A polyhedron is such a map having only convex polygons as 2-dimensional cells. A polyhedron realizes a polyhedron map if the corresponding cell complexes are isomorphic. The main aim of the authors is to give necessary combinatorial criteria for realizations of polyhedral maps in this sense. In view of common notation from graph theory and the theory of convex polytopes, they use a so-called valence-functional which is also related to the \(f\)-vector of a polyhedral map. Further on, the paper contains interesting open problems connected with this subject.