Triangulations of simplicial polytopes (Q1875898)

The \(f\)-vector of a polytope \(P\) has the number of \(i\)-dimensional faces of \(P\) as its \(i\)th component. The generalized lower bound theorem is one of the most important results in the combinatorial extremal theory of convex polytopes: For simplicial polytopes~\(P\), a certain linear transformation \(g(P)\) (the \(g\)-vector) of the \(f\)-vector has only nonnegative components. It is well known that \(g_1(P)=0\) only for \(P\) being a simplex, and \(g_2(P)=0\) only for~\(P\) being stacked simplicial. A long standing conjecture (which would generalize these two characterizations) states that \(g_r(P)=0\) only holds for a \(d\)-dimensional simplicial polytope~\(P\) that admits a triangulation (without new vertices) all of whose \((d-r)\)-dimensional faces are contained in the boundary of~\(P\) (i.e., the triangulation does not have any interior \((d-r)\)-dimensional faces). The paper presents several facts in the context of this conjecture. Due to the elegant formulations of the relations between the components of the vectors in terms of two-variate polynomials, the statements and proofs are a pleasure to read. The main results are the following: (1) In order to prove the above mentioned conjecture it suffices to show that every simplicial polytope with \(g_r(d)=0\) admits a triangulation without interior \((r-1)\)-dimensional faces. (2) If the conjecture holds for a pair \((d,r)\), then it also holds for the pair \((d+1,r)\).