Projective geometry of Wachspress coordinates

DOI10.1007/S10208-019-09441-ZMaRDI QIDQ2216249zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Publication date 15 December 2020

Published in Foundations of Computational Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Copyright license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.02123

adjoint hypersurfaces barycentric coordinates hyperplane arrangements polytopes Segre classes of monomial schemes uniform probability distributions Wachspress varieties

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Hypersurfaces and algebraic geometry (14J70) Configurations and arrangements of linear subspaces (14N20) Adjunction problems (14N30) Three-dimensional polytopes (52B10) (n)-dimensional polytopes (52B11) Arrangements of points, flats, hyperplanes (aspects of discrete geometry) (52C35)

Abstract: We show that there is a unique hypersurface of minimal degree passing through the non-faces of a polytope which is defined by a simple hyperplane arrangement. This generalizes the construction of the adjoint curve of a polygon by Wachspress in 1975. The defining polynomial of our adjoint hypersurface is the adjoint polynomial introduced by Warren in 1996. This is a key ingredient for the definition of Wachspress coordinates, which are barycentric coordinates on an arbitrary convex polytope. The adjoint polynomial also appears both in algebraic statistics, when studying the moments of uniform probability distributions on polytopes, and in intersection theory, when computing Segre classes of monomial schemes. We describe the Wachspress map, the rational map defined by the Wachspress coordinates, and the Wachspress variety, the image of this map. The inverse of the Wachspress map is the projection from the linear span of the image of the adjoint hypersurface. To relate adjoints of polytopes to classical adjoints of divisors in algebraic geometry, we study irreducible hypersurfaces that have the same degree and multiplicity along the non-faces of a polytope as its defining hyperplane arrangement. We list all finitely many combinatorial types of polytopes in dimensions two and three for which such irreducible hypersurfaces exist. In the case of polygons, the general such curves< are elliptic. In the three-dimensional case, the general such surfaces are either K3 or elliptic.

Review text

In the paper under review, the authors study the geometry of polytopes from a viewpoint of Wachspress varieties. Let us start with the following definitions. Let \(P\) be a polytope in \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\), then we consider it as a subset of \(\mathbb{P}^{n}_{\mathbb{C}}\) by taking the Zariski closure of the faces of \(P\). If the polytope \(P \subset \mathbb{P}^{n}_{\mathbb{C}}\) is full dimensional, the union of these projective subspaces is a hyperplane arrangement \(\mathcal{H}_{P}\). We also denote by \(\mathcal{R}_{P}\) the residual arrangement of \(P\), it consists of all linear spaces that are intersections of hyperplanes in \(\mathcal{H}_{P}\) and do not contain any face of \(P\). Let us consider the following example. If \(P\) is a polygon in the plane with \(d\) edges, then the residual arrangement \(\mathcal{R}_{P}\) consists of \(\binom{d}{2}-d\) points. These are exactly the intersection points of the extended edges outside of the polygon \(P\). The main result of the paper under review can be formulated as follows. Theorem A. Let \(P\) be a full-dimensional polytope \(P\) with \(d\) facets. If the hyperplane arrangement \(\mathcal{H}_{P}\) is simple (which means that through any point in \(\mathbb{P}^{n}_{\mathbb{C}}\) pass at most \(n\) hyperplanes in \(\mathcal{H}_{P}\)), there is a unique hypersurface \(A_{P}\) of degree \(d-n-1\) which vanishes along the residual arrangement \(\mathcal{R}_{P}\). If \(\mathcal{H}_{P}\) is simple, we say that \(A_{P}\) is the adjoint of the polytope \(P\). In other words, for a polytope \(P\) with simple hyperplane arrangement \(\mathcal{H}_{P}\), the ideal sheaf \(\mathcal{I}_{\mathcal{R}_{P}}\) of the residual arrangement twisted by \(d-n-1\) has a unique global section up to scaling with constant, i.e., \[h^{0}(\mathbb{P}^{n}_{\mathbb{C}}, \mathcal{I}_{\mathcal{R}_{P}}(d-n-1))=1.\] The idea of the adjoint \(A_{P}\) introduced by the authors coincide, in the case when \(P\) is a polygon in the plane, with the so-called Wachspress adjoint curve. Such a curve is defined as the minimal degree curve passing through the intersection points of pairs of lines containing non-adjacent edges of the polygon. In addition, Warren defined the adjoint polynomial for any convex polytope \(P \subset \mathbb{R}^{n}\) as follows. Fix a triangulation \(\tau(P)\) of \(P\) into simplices such that the vertices of each occuring simplex \(\sigma\) are vertices of \(P\) and then one defines the adjoint to be the polynomial: \[\mathrm{adj}_{\tau(P)}(t) := \sum_{\sigma \in \tau(P)} \mathrm{vol}(\sigma) \prod_{v \in V(P) \setminus V(\sigma)} \ell_{v}(t),\] where \(t = (t_{1}, t_{2}, \dots, t_{n})\), the set of vertices of a polytope is defined by \(V(\cdot)\), and \(\ell_{v}(t)\) denotes the linear form \(1-v_{1}t_{1} - \dots - v_{n}t_{n}\) associated with \(v\). One can show that the adjoint does not depend on the choice of triangulations. Moreover, Warren's adjoint \(\mathrm{adj}_{P}\) of a polygon \(P\) coincides with Wachspress' adjoint of the dual polygon \(P^{*}\). Finally, let us recall the notion of the Wachspress coordinates of a polytope \(P\), namely \[\forall u \in V(P) : \quad \beta_{u}(t):= \frac{ \mathrm{adj}_{F_{u}}(t) \cdot \prod_{F \in \mathcal{F}(P)\, : \, u \not\in F}\ell_{v_{F}}(t)}{\mathrm{adj}_{P^{*}}(t)},\] where \(\mathcal{F}(P)\) denotes the set of facets of \(P\), \(F_{v}\) denotes the facet of the dual polytope \(P^{*}\) that corresponds to the vertex \(v \in V(P)\), and \(v_{F}\) denotes the vertex of the dual polytope \(P^{*}\) corresponding to the facet \(F \in \mathcal{F}(P)\). Using this notion one can define a rational map \(\omega_{P} : \mathbb{P}^{n}_{\mathbb{C}} \dashrightarrow \mathbb{P}^{N-1}_{\mathbb{C}}\) \[t \mapsto \bigg( \prod_{F \in \mathcal{F}(P) \, : \, u \not\in F} \ell_{F}(t)\bigg)_{u \in V(P)},\] where \(N\) denotes the number of vertices of \(P\) and \(\ell_{F}\) is a homogeneous linear equation defining the projective closure of the hyperplane spanned by the facet \(F\). We say that \(\omega_{P}\) is the Wachspress map of a simpe polytope \(P\) and call the coordinates of \(\omega_{P}\) enumerated by the vertices \(u \in V(P)\) the Wachspress coordinates. Theorem B. For a full-dimensional polytope \(P\) in \(\mathbb{P}^{n}_{\mathbb{C}}\) with a simple hyperplane arrangement \(\mathcal{H}_{P}\) the base locus of the Wachpress map \(\omega_{P}\) is the residual arrangement \(\mathcal{R}_{P}\). Define \[\Omega_{P} := H^{0}(\mathbb{P}^{n}_{\mathbb{C}}, \mathcal{I}_{\mathcal{R}_{P}}(d-n)).\] Theorem C. For a full-dimensional polytope \(P\) in \(\mathbb{P}^{n}_{\mathbb{C}}\) with a simple hyperplane arrangement \(\mathcal{H}_{P}\), the dimension of \(\Omega_{P}\) equals to the number of the vertices of \(P\). Theorem D. Let \(P\) be a full-dimensional polytope in \(\mathbb{P}^{n}_{\mathbb{C}}\) with \(N\) vertices and a simple hyperplane arrangement \(\mathcal{H}_{P}\). The dimension of \(\mathbb{V}_{P} = \mathrm{span} \{ \omega_{P}(A_{p})\} \subset \mathbb{P}(\Omega_{P}^{*})\) is \(N-n-2\). The projection \(\rho_{P}: \mathbb{P}(\Omega_{P}^{*}) \dashrightarrow \mathbb{P}^{n}_{\mathbb{C}}\) from \(\mathbb{V}_{P}\) restricted to the Wachspress variety \(W_{p}:=\overline{\omega_{P}(\mathbb{P}^{n}_{\mathbb{C}})}\) is the inverse of the Wachspress map \(\omega_{P}\).

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