The purpose of this paper is to present a short, self-contained proof of Euler’s relation. The ingredients of this proof are (i) the principle of inclusion and exclusion of combinatorics and (ii) the Euler characteristic; a development of the Euler characteristic is included.

Abstract polytopes are discrete geometric structures which generalize the classical notion of a convex polytope. Chiral polytopes are those abstract polytopes which have maximal symmetry by rotation, in contrast to the abstract regular polytopes which have maximal symmetry by reflection. Chirality is a fascinating phenomenon which does not occur in the classical theory. The paper proves the following general extension result for chiral polytopes. If 𝒦 is a chiral polytope with regular facets 𝓕 then among all chiral polytopes with facets 𝒦 there is a universal such polytope 𝓟, whose group is a certain amalgamated product of the groups of 𝒦 and 𝓕. Finite extensions are also discussed.

R. A. Brualdi [1] presents a construction yielding matrices whose Birkhoff representation consists of the maximum number of permutation matrices and having 0(2n2) line sum. In this note a counterexample to such a construction is given. Furthermore, a new construction is presented, yielding matrices with lower line sums.

The purpose of this note is to tie together some results concerning doubly stochastic matrices and their representations as convex combinations of permutation matrices.