Sperner's colorings and optimal partitioning of the simplex

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-44479-6_25zbMATH Open1384.05188arXiv1611.08339OpenAlexW2558183505MaRDI QIDQ4604392FDOQ4604392

Authors: Maryam Mirzakhani, Jan Vondrák 

Publication date: 26 February 2018

Published in: A Journey Through Discrete Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We discuss coloring and partitioning questions related to Sperner's Lemma, originally motivated by an application in hardness of approximation. Informally, we call a partitioning of the $(k-1)$-dimensional simplex into $k$ parts, or a labeling of a lattice inside the simplex by $k$ colors, "Sperner-admissible" if color $i$ avoids the face opposite to vertex $i$. The questions we study are of the following flavor: What is the Sperner-admissible labeling/partitioning that makes the total area of the boundary between different colors/parts as small as possible? First, for a natural arrangement of "cells" in the simplex, we prove an optimal lower bound on the number of cells that must be non-monochromatic in any Sperner-admissible labeling. This lower bound is matched by a simple labeling where each vertex receives the minimum admissible color. Second, we show for this arrangement that in contrast to Sperner's Lemma, there is a Sperner-admissible labeling such that every cell contains at most $4$ colors. Finally, we prove a geometric variant of the first result: For any Sperner-admissible partition of the regular simplex, the total surface area of the boundary shared by at least two different parts is minimized by the Voronoi partition $(A_1^{\ast },ldots,A_k^{\ast })$ where $A_i^{\ast }$ contains all the points whose closest vertex is $i$. We also discuss possible extensions of this result to general polytopes and some open questions.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.08339

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zbMATH Keywords

Sperner's lemmaVoronoi partitionseparating set

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Hypergraphs (05C65) Combinatorial aspects of simplicial complexes (05E45)

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Cited In (6)

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• Sperner type lemma for quadrangulations
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• The discrete yet ubiquitous theorems of Carathéodory, Helly, Sperner, Tucker, and Tverberg

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