Shelling Coxeter-like Complexes and Sorting on Trees
Abstract
Description
In their work on `Coxeter-like complexes', Babson and Reiner introduced a simplicial complex $Δ_T$ associated to each tree $T$ on $n$ nodes, generalizing chessboard complexes and type A Coxeter complexes. They conjectured that $Δ_T$ is $(n-b-1)$-connected when the tree has $b$ leaves. We provide a shelling for the $(n-b)$-skeleton of $Δ_T$, thereby proving this conjecture.
In the process, we introduce notions of weak order and inversion functions on the labellings of a tree $T$ which imply shellability of $Δ_T$, and we construct such inversion functions for a large enough class of trees to deduce the aforementioned conjecture and also recover the shellability of chessboard complexes $M_{m,n}$ with $n \ge 2m-1$. We also prove that the existence or nonexistence of an inversion function for a fixed tree governs which networks with a tree structure admit greedy sorting algorithms by inversion elimination and provide an inversion function for trees where each vertex has capacity at least its degree minus one.
23 pages
23 pages