Nonrational configurations, polytopes, and surfaces

DOI10.1007/BF02985377zbMATH Open1210.00047arXiv0710.4453OpenAlexW2136913471MaRDI QIDQ976302FDOQ976302

Günter M. Ziegler

Publication date: 17 June 2010

Published in: The Mathematical Intelligencer (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: It is an amazing and a bit counter-intuitive discovery by Micha Perles from the sixties that there are ``non-rational polytopes: combinatorial types of convex polytopes that cannot be realized with rational vertex coordinates. We describe a simple construction of non-rational polytopes that does not need duality (Perles' ``Gale diagrams): It starts from a non-rational point configuration in the plane, and proceeds with so-called Lawrence extensions. We also show that there are non-rational polyhedral surfaces in 3-space, a discovery by Ulrich Brehm from 1997. His construction also starts from any non-rational point configuration in the plane, and then performs what one should call Brehm extensions, in order to obtain non-rational partial surfaces. These examples and objects are first mile stones on the way to the remarkable "universality theorems for polytopes and for polyhedral surfaces by Mn"ev (1986), Richter-Gebert (1994), and Brehm (1997).

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/0710.4453

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zbMATH Keywords

Lawrence extensionnonrational configurationnonrational polyhedral surfacenonrational polytopes

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Polyhedral manifolds (52B70) Polytopes and polyhedra (52B99) General and miscellaneous specific topics (00A99) Real and complex geometry (51M99)

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Cited In (14)

• Anti-Dürer conjecture for non-convex polyhedra
• Configurations of non-crossing rays and related problems
• Configurations of lines in del Pezzo surfaces with Gosset polytopes
• The Hodge theory of the Hecke category
• Positive geometries and canonical forms
• Antiprismlessness, or: reducing combinatorial equivalence to projective equivalence in realizability problems for polytopes
• Ehrhart theory for Lawrence polytopes and orbifold cohomology of hypertoric varieties
• Noch ein Erdbeben in der vierten Dimension
• Betti numbers of the geometric spaces associated to nonrational simple convex polytopes
• Many projectively unique polytopes
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• GEOMETRIC SPACES FROM ARBITRARY CONVEX POLYTOPES
• Combining realization space models of polytopes
• Toric quasifolds

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