Sperner labellings: A combinatorial approach

In 2002, De Loera, Peterson and Su proved the following conjecture of Atanassov: let T be a triangulation of a d-dimensional polytope P with n vertices v1,v2,…,vn; label the vertices of T by 1,2,…,n in such a way that a vertex of T belonging to the interior of a face F of P can only be labelled by j if vj is on F; then there are at least n−d simplices labelled with d+1 different labels. We prove a generalisation of this theorem which refines this lower bound and which is valid for a larger class of objects.