Steffen's flexible polyhedron is embedded. A proof via symbolic computations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Alexandrov, Victor, Volokitin, Evgenii
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Alexandrov, Victor
Volokitin, Evgenii
author_facet Alexandrov, Victor
Volokitin, Evgenii
contents A polyhedron is flexible if it can be continuously deformed preserving the shape and dimensions of every its face. In the late 1970's Klaus Steffen constructed a sphere-homeomorphic embedded flexible polyhedron with triangular faces and with 9 vertices only, which is well-known in the theory of flexible polyhedra. At about the same time, a hypothesis was formulated that the Steffen polyhedron has the least possible number of vertices among all embedded flexible polyhedra without boundary. A counterexample to this hypothesis was constructed by Matteo Gallet, Georg Grasegger, Jan Legersk{ý}, and Josef Schicho in 2024 only. Surprisingly, until now, no proof has been published in the mathematical literature that the Steffen polyhedron is embedded. Probably, this fact was considered obvious to everyone who made a cardboard model of this polyhedron. In this article, we prove this fact using computer symbolic calculations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_02392
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Steffen's flexible polyhedron is embedded. A proof via symbolic computations
Alexandrov, Victor
Volokitin, Evgenii
Metric Geometry
52C25 (Primary) 52B70, 51M20 (Secondary)
A polyhedron is flexible if it can be continuously deformed preserving the shape and dimensions of every its face. In the late 1970's Klaus Steffen constructed a sphere-homeomorphic embedded flexible polyhedron with triangular faces and with 9 vertices only, which is well-known in the theory of flexible polyhedra. At about the same time, a hypothesis was formulated that the Steffen polyhedron has the least possible number of vertices among all embedded flexible polyhedra without boundary. A counterexample to this hypothesis was constructed by Matteo Gallet, Georg Grasegger, Jan Legersk{ý}, and Josef Schicho in 2024 only. Surprisingly, until now, no proof has been published in the mathematical literature that the Steffen polyhedron is embedded. Probably, this fact was considered obvious to everyone who made a cardboard model of this polyhedron. In this article, we prove this fact using computer symbolic calculations.
title Steffen's flexible polyhedron is embedded. A proof via symbolic computations
topic Metric Geometry
52C25 (Primary) 52B70, 51M20 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02392