A lost counterexample and a problem on illuminated polytopes

DOI10.4169/AMER.MATH.MONTHLY.118.06.534MaRDI QIDQ3012017zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Ronald Frank Wotzlaw, Günter M. Ziegler

Publication date 30 June 2011

Published in The American Mathematical Monthly (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1698

zbMATH Keywords

Gale diagramilluminated polytopepositively spanning configuration

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

(n)-dimensional polytopes (52B11) Variants of convex sets (star-shaped, ((m, n))-convex, etc.) (52A30) Other problems of combinatorial convexity (52A37) Gale and other diagrams (52B35)

Abstract: In a Note added in proof to a 1984 paper, Daniel A. Marcus claimed to have a counterexample to his conjecture that a minimal positively k-spanning vector configuration in R^m has size at most 2km. However, the counterexample was never published, and seems to be lost. Independently, ten years earlier, Peter Mani in 1974 solved a problem by Hadwiger, disproving that every ``illuminated d-dimensional polytope must have at least 2d vertices. These two studies are related by Gale duality, an elementary linear algebra technique devised by Micha A. Perles in the sixties. Thus, we note that Mani's study provides a counterexample for Marcus' conjecture with exactly the parameters that Marcus had claimed. In the other direction, with Marcus' tools we provide an answer to a problem left open by Mani: Could ``illuminated d-dimensional polytopes on a minimal number of vertices be nonsimplicial?

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Cited in

(4)

• Polytopes with few vertices and few facets
• Gale diagrams of convex polytopes and positive spanning sets of vectors
• Incidence graphs and unneighborly polytopes
• Illumination complexes, -zonotopes, and the polyhedral curtain theorem

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