There is a long history of constructions of non-shellable triangulations of -dimensional (topological) balls. This paper gives a survey of these constructions, including Furch’s 1924 construction using knotted curves, which also appears in Bing’s 1962 survey of combinatorial approaches to the Poincaré conjecture, Newman’s 1926 explicit example, and M. E. Rudin’s 1958 non-shellable triangulation...

Our purpose in this article is to investigate the order complex of inclusion poset PFn of Borel orbit closures in skew-symmetric matrices. We prove that PFn is an EL-shellable poset and furthermore its order complex triangulates a ball. We investigate (rook-theoretic) combinatorial properties of the rank-generating function of PFn in contrast with the zeta function of the variety of skew-symmet...

In the early 60s, Harary and Hill conjectured H(n) := 1 4b2 cbn−1 2 cbn−2 2 cbn−3 2 c to be the minimum number of crossings among all drawings of the complete graph Kn. It has recently been shown that this conjecture holds for so-called shellable drawings of Kn. For n ≥ 11 odd, we construct a non-shellable family of drawings of Kn with exactly H(n) crossings. In particular, every edge in our dr...

Among shellable complexes a certain class is shown to have maximal modular homology, and these are the so-called saturated complexes. We show that certain conditions on the links of the complex imply saturation. We prove that Coxeter complexes and buildings are saturated. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)

In this paper, we characterize the shellable complete $t$-partite graphs. We also show for these types of graphs the concepts vertex decomposable, shellable and sequentially Cohen-Macaulay are equivalent. Furthermore, we give a combinatorial condition for the Cohen-Macaulay complete $t$-partite graphs.

We prove that for every d ≥ 2, deciding if a pure, d-dimensional, simplicial complex is shellable is NP-hard, hence NP-complete. This resolves a question raised, e.g., by Danaraj and Klee in 1978. Our reduction also yields that for every d ≥ 2 and k ≥ 0, deciding if a pure, d-dimensional, simplicial complex is k-decomposable is NP-hard. For d ≥ 3, both problems remain NP-hard when restricted to...

It is shown that the coset lattice of a finite group has shellable order complex if and only if the group is complemented. Furthermore, the coset lattice is shown to have a Cohen–Macaulay order complex in exactly the same conditions. The group theoretical tools used are relatively elementary, and avoid the classification of finite simple groups and of minimal finite simple groups. © 2006 Elsevi...

Orthogonal forms of positive Boolean functions play an important role in reliability theory, since the probability that they take value 1 can be easily computed. However, few classes of disjunctive normal forms are known for which orthogonalization can be efficiently performed. An interesting class with this property is the class of shellable disjunctive normal forms (DNFs). In this paper, we p...

The h-polynomial of the barycentric subdivision any n-dimensional cubical complex with nonnegative h-vector is shown to have only real roots and be interlaced by Eulerian polynomial type Bn. This result applies subdivisions shellable complexes and, in particular, convex polytopes answers affirmatively a question Brenti, Mohammadi Welker.