A universality theorem for projectively unique polytopes and a conjecture of Shephard (Q273091)

A polytope \(P\) is the convex hull of finitely many points in \(\mathbf R^d\); if these points can be chosen with real algebraic coordinates then \(P\) is algebraic. The main result of the paper under review says that for any algebraic polytope \(P\), there exists a polytope that is projectively unique and contains a face projectively equivalent to \(P\). (Two polytopes are projectively equivalent if there is a projective transformation between them, and a polytope is projectively unique if any polytope with the same combinatorial face structure is projectively equivalent to it.) The authors then apply a refinement of the above theorem to provide a counterexample to a conjecture of Shephard from the 1970s: they construct a 5-dimensional polytope that is not realizable as a subpolytope of a stacked polytope. (A \(d\)-dimensional stacked polytope is the connected sum of polytopes each of which has at most \(d+1\) facets; here \(P\) is the connected sum of the polytopes \(Q\) and \(R\) if \(P = Q \cup R\) and \(Q \cap R\) is a common face of \(Q\) and \(R\) whose boundary complex is present in that of \(P\).)