Applications of Klee's Dehn-Sommerville relations

Abstract

We use Klee's Dehn-Sommerville relations and other results on face numbers of homology manifolds without boundary to (i) prove Kalai's conjecture providing lower bounds on the f-vectors of an even-dimensional manifold with all but the middle Betti number vanishing, (ii) verify K\"uhnel's conjecture that gives an upper bound on the middle Betti number of a 2k-dimensional manifold in terms of k and the number of vertices, and (iii) partially prove K\"uhnel's conjecture providing upper bounds on other Betti numbers of odd- and even-dimensional manifolds. For manifolds with boundary, we derive an extension of Klee's Dehn-Sommerville relations and strengthen Kalai's result on the number of their edges.