In analogy to the skeletons of a simplicial complex and their Stanley–Reisner ideals we introduce the skeletons of an arbitrary monomial ideal I ⊂ S = K [x1, …, xn ]. This allows us to compute the depth of S /I in terms of its skeleton ideals. We apply these techniques to show that Stanley's conjecture on Stanley decompositions of S /I holds provided it holds whenever S /I is Cohen–Macaulay. We also discuss a conjecture of Soleyman Jahan and show that it suffices to prove his conjecture for monomial ideals with linear resolution
