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4sphere

Random question for (the server and community generally):

Given a number n of points in a d dimensional space, we can think of the Delaunay triangulation of a configuration of those points as an adjacency matrix. I'm curious if anyone knows how many distinct configurations you can have: where two configurations are distinct if their adjacency matrices are not equal.

I haven't been able to work out a solution myself and most of my searches don't get me much.

@4sphere That smells of oriented matroids, but I'm too uneducated on them to give any usurp answer...

@BernhardWerner

You may be right. I think you can look at it as a configuration space for the points: product of one copy of the space for each point, less all the subspaces where m points are in the same location, and modding out any relevant permutations (not as many as there could be; ideally, I'd like the points to be distinct).

Haven't done much in that direction myself.

@MoritzFirsching

Checking now. I think this is assuming more regularity in how the points are distributed than I'd like, and I'm not sure how to restrict these results to finite sets.

Still, this looks very helpful! Thanks for the recommendation!

@4sphere In the case of d=2, this amounts to finding how many distinct graphs arise as the 1-skeleton of a Delaunay cellulation? In turn, I think this can be reduced to determining which graphs are inscribable in the sphere. Adding a point at infinity connected to all of the outermost points of the Daulaunay graph will give an inscribable polyhedron, thought of as the convex hull of ideal points in the upper half-space model of hyperbolic space.

@4sphere There is an algorithm to characterize inscribable polyhedra, but it might be hard to turn this in to an enumeration. mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet-.

mathscinet.ams.orgMR: Matches for: MR=1149872

@4sphere Looking at the papers citing that one, I found another that gives a characterization of planar Delaunay triangulations. mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet-

mathscinet.ams.orgMR: Matches for: MR=3746818

@4sphere The Delaunay triangulation of points in n dimensions is determined by the order type of their lift to n+1 dimensions, where "lift" = set final coordinate equal to sum of squares of input coordinates, and "order type" = orientation of each simplex. The number of these order types is n(d+1)2n(1+o(1)): see Goodman & Pollack, "Allowable Sequences and Order Types in Discrete and Computational Geometry", doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-5804

So that's at least a rough upper bound, exponential in O(nlogn) and much smaller than the trivial 2n(n1)/2 bound on the number of possible adjacency matrices.

@11011110

This looks great! Thank you!!