English

Polyhedra inscribed in a quadric

Differential Geometry 2014-10-15 v1 Geometric Topology Metric Geometry

Abstract

We study convex polyhedra in three-space that are inscribed in a quadric surface. Up to projective transformations, there are three such surfaces: the sphere, the hyperboloid, and the cylinder. Our main result is that a planar graph Γ\Gamma is realized as the 11-skeleton of a polyhedron inscribed in the hyperboloid or cylinder if and only if Γ\Gamma is realized as the 11-skeleton of a polyhedron inscribed in the sphere and Γ\Gamma admits a Hamiltonian cycle. Rivin characterized convex polyhedra inscribed in the sphere by studying the geometry of ideal polyhedra in hyperbolic space. We study the case of the hyperboloid and the cylinder by parameterizing the space of convex ideal polyhedra in anti-de Sitter geometry and in half-pipe geometry. Just as the cylinder can be seen as a degeneration of the sphere and the hyperboloid, half-pipe geometry is naturally a limit of both hyperbolic and anti-de Sitter geometry. We promote a unified point of view to the study of the three cases throughout.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1410.3774,
  title  = {Polyhedra inscribed in a quadric},
  author = {Jeffrey Danciger and Sara Maloni and Jean-Marc Schlenker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.3774},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

42 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T06:23:17.745Z