Face numbers of manifolds with boundary

Abstract

We study face numbers of simplicial complexes that triangulate manifolds (or even normal pseudomanifolds) with boundary. Specifically, we establish a sharp lower bound on the number of interior edges of a simplicial normal pseudomanifold with boundary in terms of the number of interior vertices and relative Betti numbers. Moreover, for triangulations of manifolds with boundary all of whose vertex links have the weak Lefschetz property, we extend this result to sharp lower bounds on the number of higher-dimensional interior faces. Along the way we develop a version of Bagchi and Datta's $\sigma$- and $\mu$-numbers for the case of relative simplicial complexes and prove stronger versions of the above statements with the Betti numbers replaced by the $\mu$-numbers. Our results provide natural generalizations of known theorems and conjectures for closed manifolds and appear to be new even for the case of a ball.