Counting the faces of randomly-projected hypercubes and orthants, with applications (Q2380787)

There are three fundamental regular polytopes in \({\mathbb R}^N\), \(N\geq 5\): the hypercube \(I^N\), the cross-polytope \(C^N\), and the simplex \(T^{N-1}\). For each of these, projecting the vertices into \({\mathbb R}^n\), \(n< N\), yields the vertices of a new polytope. In fact, up to translation and dilation, every polytope in \({\mathbb R}^n\) is obtained by rotating the simplex \(T^{N-1}\) and orthogonally projecting on the first \(n\) coordinates, for some choice of \(N\) and of \(N\)-dimensional rotation. Similarly, every centrally symmetric polytope can be generated by projecting the cross-polytope, and every zonotope by projecting the hypercube. The paper is organized as follows: Section 1 contains formulations of the main results of the paper. Section 2 contains the proofs of the main results. Sections 3 and 4 are devoted to contrast the hypercube with other polytopes and with the cone. Section 5 is devoted to the application of face counting results in signal processing, information theory, and probability theory.