Pre-triangulations and liftable complexes (Q2471725)

The concept of a pseudo-triangulation of a planar point set [\textit{M. Pocchiola} and \textit{G. Vegter}, Discrete Comput. Geom. 16, No.~4, 419--453 (1996; Zbl 0857.68063)], [\textit{D. Orden} and \textit{F. Santos}, ibid. 33, No.~2, 275--305 (2005; Zbl 1063.68077)] is generalized to the pre-triangulations in the title. A pre-triangle is defined as a not necessarily simply connected polygonal region with exactly three corners, i.e., vertices such that no internal angle formed by two incident edges is larger than~\(\pi\). A pre-triangulation is then roughly a decomposition of a polygonal complex into finitely many pre-triangles. The authors then consider the following scenarios: \(\bullet\) Lifting polygonal complexes to 3-space: A polygonal complex is combinatorial projective (in the authors' choice of terminology) if, for a random perturbation of the vertices of a polygonal complex, the dimension of the space of liftings of the perturbed complex is maximal with probability~1. It then turns out that all polygonal complexes with this property are pre-triangulations. \(\bullet\) Generalized flips: The authors introduce a notion of flip for so-called face-reducible complexes. The set of pre-triangulations turns out to be closed under this operation. \(\bullet\) Delone complexes: For suitably generic (but not necessarily simply-connected) polygonal complexes, there is an analog of the Delone property for usual triangulations. The authors show that such a Delone-complex can be reached by their generalized flip operation.