CMSA Interdisciplinary Science Seminar: A universal triangulation for flat tori

CMSA EVENTS

Speaker:

Francis Lazarus - CNRS / Grenoble University

A celebrated theorem of Nash completed by Kuiper implies that every smooth Riemannian surface has a C¹ isometric embedding in the Euclidean 3-space E³. An analogous result, due to Burago and Zalgaller, states that every polyhedral surface, obtained by gluing Euclidean triangles, has an isometric PL embedding in E³. In particular, this provides PL isometric embeddings for every flat torus (a quotient of E² by a rank 2 lattice). However, the proof of Burago and Zalgaller is partially constructive, relying on the Nash-Kuiper theorem. In practice, it produces PL embeddings with a huge number of vertices, moreover distinct for every flat torus. Based on a construction of Zalgaller and on recent works by Arnoux et al. we exhibit a universal triangulation with less than 10.000 vertices, admitting for any flat torus an isometric embedding that is linear on each triangle. Based on joint work with Florent Tallerie.

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