Persistent Graphs and Cyclic Polytope Triangulations

Abstract: We prove a bijection between the triangulations of the 3-dimensional cyclic polytope C(n+2, 3) and persistent graphs with n vertices. We show that under this bijection the Stasheff-Tamari orders on triangulations naturally translate to subgraph inclusion between persistent graphs. Moreover, we describe a connection to the second higher Bruhat order B(n, 2). We additionally give an algorithm to efficiently enumerate all persistent graphs on n vertices and thus all triangulations of C(n+2, 3).