Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 ii Paper 4 20I b Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-05
Triangulate the sphere by the boundary complex of the cross-polytope with simplicial vertices : a face contains at most one simplicial vertex from each antipodal pair. Take its barycentric subdivision. Its simplicial vertices are the nonempty faces of the original complex, and its simplices are strictly nested chains .
Form a quotient complex whose simplicial vertices are pairs , and whose simplices are the images of these chains. No chain contains both and . Moreover a chain of face-orbits lifts uniquely up to simultaneous negation: after choosing a largest face, every smaller face has at most one representative contained in it, because an original face contains no antipodal simplicial vertices. Thus the quotient is an honest simplicial complex, without two different simplices with the same simplicial vertex set. Its realization is homeomorphic to the sphere modulo its antipodal action. This provides a triangulation of Real projective space . The subdivision avoids the duplicate-simplex problem of naively identifying simplicial vertices in the unsubdivided cross-polytope boundary.