The flag polynomial of the Minkowski sum of simplices

Abstract

For a polytope we define the {\em flag polynomial}, a polynomial in commuting variables related to the well-known flag vector and describe how to express the the flag polynomial of the Minkowski sum of $k$ standard simplices in a direct and canonical way in terms of the {\em $k$-th master polytope} $P(k)$ where $k\in\nats$. The flag polynomial facilitates many direct computations. To demonstrate this we provide two examples; we first derive a formula for the $f$-polynomial and the maximum number of $d$-dimensional faces of the Minkowski sum of two simplices. We then compute the maximum discrepancy between the number of $(0,d)$-chains of faces of a Minkowski sum of two simplices and the number of such chains of faces of a simple polytope of the same dimension and on the same number of vertices.