Orthogonal Surfaces and Their CP-Orders

Orthogonal surfaces are nice mathematical objects which have interesting connections to various fields, e.g., integer programming, monomial ideals and order dimension. While orthogonal surfaces in one or two dimensions are rather trivial already the three dimensional case has a rich structure with connections to Schnyder woods, planar graphs and 3-polytopes. Our objective is to detect more of the structure of orthogonal surfaces in four and higher dimensions. In particular we are driven by the question which non-generic orthogonal surfaces have a polytopal structure. We review the state of knowledge of the 3-dimensional situation. On that basis we introduce terminology for higher dimensional orthogonal surfaces and continue with the study of characteristic points and the cp-orders of orthogonal surfaces, i.e., the dominance orders on the characteristic points. In the generic case these orders are (almost) face lattices of polytopes. Examples show that in general cp-orders can lack key ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: ORDER
• Authors: Stefan Felsner, Sarah Kappes
• Keywords: Dimensions, ORDER 2008, Orthogonal, Surfaces