Shellings of spheres and polytopes

Abstract

Abstract : Bruggesser and Mani proved the boundary complex B(P) of a polytope P always admits a shelling. By constructing appropriate linear functionals on certain polytopes dual to P, shellings are here produced that satisfy strong conditions on the order of appearance of P's facets. Also included are some results on shellings of more general complexes. The results on shellings contained here play a role in a current attack on the d-step conjecture of linear programming. (Author)