English

Unfolding Orthogonal Polyhedra with Quadratic Refinement: The Delta-Unfolding Algorithm

Computational Geometry 2011-12-21 v1 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

We show that every orthogonal polyhedron homeomorphic to a sphere can be unfolded without overlap while using only polynomially many (orthogonal) cuts. By contrast, the best previous such result used exponentially many cuts. More precisely, given an orthogonal polyhedron with n vertices, the algorithm cuts the polyhedron only where it is met by the grid of coordinate planes passing through the vertices, together with Theta(n^2) additional coordinate planes between every two such grid planes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1112.4791,
  title  = {Unfolding Orthogonal Polyhedra with Quadratic Refinement: The Delta-Unfolding Algorithm},
  author = {Mirela Damian and Erik Demaine and Robin Flatland},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1112.4791},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

15 pages, 10 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T19:54:41.243Z