Products of foldable triangulations (Q875253)

A triangulation of an \(m\)-polytope is foldable if, intuitively, the triangulation can be folded along the connecting \((m-1)\)-dimensional faces, so that the triangulation collapses to a single \(m\)-simplex. Note that foldability is a combinatorial condition -- if the simplices have different shapes or sizes, this is ignored. A triangulation is foldable if and only if its 1-skeleton is \((m+1)\)-vertex colourable. (See the article under review for further definitions and discussion.) Equivalently, a triangulation is foldable if its facets may be coloured black and white, checkerboard-style, so that no two adjacent facets have the same colour. The article under review considers foldable triangulations of products of polytopes, and of lattice polytopes, focusing especially on foldable triangulations which are regular and dense (see the article for definitions). The signature of a foldable triangulation is the (positive) difference between the numbers of black and white facets. The signature of a lattice polytope is the largest signature of its regular dense foldable triangulations. The article gives lower bounds for the signatures of the \(d\)-cubes \([0,1]^d\), showing that these increase superexponentially with \(d\). Explicit values are given for a few small \(d\), and computer experiments are described for a few slightly larger \(d\).