Strongly Signable and Partitionable Posets

The class ofStrongly Signablepartially ordered sets is introduced and studied. It is show that strong signability, reminiscent of Björner–Wachsʹ recursive coatom orderability, provides a useful and broad sufficient condition for a poset to be dual CR and hence partitionable. The flagh-vectors of strongly signable posets are therefore non-negative. It is proved that recursively shellable posets, polyhedral fans, and face lattices of partitionable simplicial complexes are all strongly signable, and it is conjectured that all spherical posets are. It is concluded that the barycentric subdivision of a partitionable complex is again partitionable, and an algorithm for producing a partitioning of the subdivision from a partitioning of the complex is described. An expression for the flagh-polynomial of a simplicial complex in terms of itsh-vector is given, and is used to demonstrate that the flagh-vector is symmetric or non-negative whenever theh-vector is.