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Constructions and complexity of secondary polytopes. (English) Zbl 0714.52004
The paper presents a self-contained and comprehensive study of secondary polytopes. The secondary polytope $$\Sigma$$ ($${\mathcal A})$$ of a configuration $${\mathcal A}$$ of n points in affine (d-1)-space is an (n-d)- polytope whose vertices correspond to regular triangulations of conv($${\mathcal A}).$$
Besides the original Gelfand-Kapranov-Zelevinsky construction a construction of $$\Sigma$$ ($${\mathcal A})$$ as the projection of a universal polytope $${\mathcal U}({\mathcal A})$$ is given.
Especially interesting is a third construction of $$\Sigma$$ ($${\mathcal A})$$ using Gale transforms. This point of view is the most constructive one. It leads to an algorithm for computing all regular triangulations of $${\mathcal A}$$. The rest of the paper deals with other aspects of the computational complexity of secondary polytopes (for instance a bound for the number of faces of $$\Sigma$$ (A) is given).
Reviewer: H.-D.Hecker

##### MSC:
 52B05 Combinatorial properties of polytopes and polyhedra (number of faces, shortest paths, etc.) 52B55 Computational aspects related to convexity 68U05 Computer graphics; computational geometry (digital and algorithmic aspects) 52B35 Gale and other diagrams 68Q25 Analysis of algorithms and problem complexity 05B30 Other designs, configurations
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