English

Rigidity of polytopes with edge length and coplanarity constraints

Combinatorics 2026-03-11 v3 Discrete Mathematics Metric Geometry

Abstract

We investigate a novel setting for polytope rigidity, where a flex must preserve edge lengths and the planarity of faces, but is allowed to change the shapes of faces. For instance, the regular cube is flexible in this notion. We present techniques for constructing flexible polytopes and find that flexibility seems to be an exceptional property. Based on this observation, we introduce a notion of generic realizations for polytopes and conjecture that convex polytopes are generically rigid in dimension d3d\geq 3. We prove this conjecture in dimension d=3d=3. Motivated by our findings we also pose several questions that are intended to inspire future research into this notion of polytope rigidity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.00874,
  title  = {Rigidity of polytopes with edge length and coplanarity constraints},
  author = {Matthias Himmelmann and Bernd Schulze and Martin Winter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.00874},
  year   = {2026}
}