Barycenters of polytope skeleta and counterexamples to the topological Tverberg conjecture, via constraints (Q2002836)

The authors use their previously introduced ``constraint method'' to give new, simpler and shorter proofs to a number of statements previously proved by different authors. In particular, among other things, they prove a theorem of Dobbins on possible representations of a point of a convex \(d\)-polytope as the barycenter of \(r \geq 1\) points of the \(k\)-skeleton of the polytope, where \(k \geq 1\) and \(kr \geq d\). Furthermore, they prove that the Topological Tverberg Conjecture fails for all values of \(r\) which are not prime powers. More specifically, they prove that if \(r \geq 6\) is an integer that is not a prime power, \(k \geq 3\) is an integer, and \(N=(r-1)(rk+2)\), then there is a continuous map \(F : \Delta_N \rightarrow {\mathbb{R}}^{rk+1}\) of an \(N\)-dimensional simplex \(\Delta_N\) such that for any \(r\) pairwise disjoint faces \(\sigma_1, \sigma_2,\ldots, \sigma_r\), we have \(\bigcap_{i=1}^r F(\sigma_i) = \emptyset\). Finally, by defining the quantity \(N_r(d)\) as the smallest integer \(N\) with the property that for any continuous map \(F : \Delta_N \rightarrow {\mathbb{R}}^d\), there are \(r\) pairwise disjoint faces \(\sigma_1, \sigma_2,\ldots, \sigma_r\) such that \(\bigcap_{i=1}^r F(\sigma_i) \neq \emptyset\), they make a conjecture about the values of \(N_r(d)\) if \(r\) is not a power of a prime.