Affine-compact functors

Abstract

Several well known polytopal constuctions are examined from the functorial point of view. A naive analogy between the Billera-Sturmfels fiber polytope and the abelian kernel is disproved by an infinite explicit series of polytopes. A correct functorial formula is provided in terms of an affine-compact substitute of the abelian kernel. The dual cokernel object is almost always the natural affine projection. The Mond-Smith-van Straten space of sandwiched simplices, useful in stochastic factorizations, leads to a different kind of affine-compact functors and new challenges in polytope theory.