Spatial polyhedra without diagonals (Q1327516)

A 2-pseudomanifold is called neighborly if any two vertices are connected by an edge. The smallest examples are given by the boundary complex of a tetrahedron (4-vertices -- this is the only neighborly 3-polytope) and the Csásar torus (7 vertices), for which the space of all realization was determined by the second author and \textit{A. Eggert} [Topology Struct. 17, 59-78 (1991; Zbl 0748.51016)]. In view of the still-not-disproved question whether every orientable simplicial 2-manifold has a straight embedding in \(\mathbb{R}^ 3\), the paper under review studies the next interesting case: neighborly simplicial 2- manifolds with 9 vertices (corresponding to Mendelsohn triple systems \(S_ 2 (2,3,0))\). Using improved algorithms for oriented matroid realizability, and final polynomials for nonrealizability proofs, the authors show that all five combinatorial types have straight realizations in \(\mathbb{R}^ 3\). However, they also find that there are some topological types of embeddings into \(\mathbb{R}^ 3\) which are not isotopic to straight realizations.