On the number of corner cuts

A corner cut in dimension d is a finite subset of N0d that can be separated from its complement in N0d by an affine hyperplane disjoint from N0d. Corner cuts were first investigated by Onn and Sturmfels [Adv. Appl. Math. 23 (1999) 29-48], their original motivation stemmed from computational commutative algebra. Let us write (Nd0k)cut for the set of corner cuts of cardinality k; in the computational geometer's terminology, these are the k-sets of N0d. Among other things, Onn and Sturmfels give an upper bound of O(k2d(d-1)/(d+1)) for the size of (Nd0k)cut when the dimension is fixed. In two dimensions, it is known (see [Corteel et al., Adv. Appl. Math. 23 (1) (1999) 49-53]) that #(Nd0k)cut = Θ(k log k). We will see that in general, for any fixed dimension d, the order of magnitude of #(Nd0k)cut is between kd-1 log k and (k log k)d-1. (It has been communicated to me that the same bounds have been found independently by G. Rémond.) In fact, the elements of (Nd0k)cut correspond to the vertices of a certain polytope, and what our proof shows is that the above upper bound holds for the total number of flags of that polytope.