The discrete yet ubiquitous theorems of Carathéodory, Helly, Sperner, Tucker, and Tverberg

Abstract

We discuss five fundamental results of discrete mathematics: the lemmas of Sperner and Tucker from combinatorial topology and the theorems of Carathéodory, Helly, and Tverberg from combinatorial geometry. We explore their connections and emphasize their broad impact in application areas such as data science, game theory, graph theory, mathematical optimization, computational geometry, etc.