Normality criteria for monomial ideals (Q2103343)

The work under review is a study of normality of monomial ideals via linear programming and graph theory. Using a normality criterion (Proposition 3.2), in the first main result, the authors give a characterization of the normality of an ideal generated by degree 2 monomials in terms of the Hilbert basis property of the set of vectors \[ \mathcal{B}=\{e_{s+1}\}\cup\{e_i+e_{s+1}:i=1,\dots,s\}\cup\{(v_i,1):i=1,\dots,q\}, \] where \(e_i\) are the members of the canonical basis of \(\mathbb{R}^{s+1}\) and \(v_i\in \mathbb{N}^{s}\) are the exponent of vectors of the monomials of the minimal monomial generating set of \(I\) (Theorem 4.1). The same set comes into play in Theorem 4.4, where a characterization of the equality between the semigroup ring of \(\mathbb{N}\mathcal{B}\) and the Ehrhart ring of \[ \mathcal{Q}=\operatorname{conv}(0,e_1,\dots,e_s,v_1,\dots,v_q)\subset \mathbb{R}^s \] is given in terms the \textit{integer rounding property} of the linear system \(x\geq 0\); \(xA\leq 1\), where \(A\) is the matrix with columns \(v_1,\dots,v_q\). In Section 5 the authors switch the focus to the ideal of covers of a simple graph \(I_c(G)\). In Theorem 5.2, they show that if the neighbor set of a vertex, \(v\), is a minimal vertex cover of \(G\), then \(I_c(G\setminus v)\) is normal if and only if \(I_c(G)\) is. Next they show that if the graph has independence number \(\leq 2\), then \(I_c(G)\) is normal if and only if the edge ideal of the complement graph of \(G\) is normal (Theorem 5.11). Finally, Section 6 contains examples and an appendix contains Normaliz and Macaulay2 procedures to determine the normality of a monomial ideal, the minimal generators of the ideal of covers of a clutter and the Hilbert bases of cones used in the article.