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Séminaire de Géométrie

Tores plats polyédraux

Alba Málaga Sabogal

Salle 2

le 15 avril 2022 à 10:45

"The only compact surface with positive constant curvature is the sphere, which is unique up to homothety; the only compact surface with everywhere zero curvature is the torus, and there is a 2-dimensional family of such tori, parameterised by a subset of the complex plane (a fundamental domain of the modular surface). This parameter is called the modulus of the flat torus. However, while it is trivial to give a smooth (twice continuously differentiable) realisation of the sphere in 3-dimensional space, a smooth model of a flat torus cannot exist: such a model, being compact, would be contained in a sphere, and any intersection point of the model with a minimal containing sphere would have positive curvature. Borrelli et al in 2012 gave a once continuously differentiable isometric embedding for the square torus. Origami-style models, i.e. models as polyhedral surfaces in 3-dimensional space, exist for all flat tori (flat tori of any modulus), by work of Zalgaller and Burago in the 1990s, but have not become common knowledge, and many still deem it impossible. We explain in this text how to produce paper layouts to realise physically such origami-style models of flat tori, and we prove that flat tori of all moduli can be realised this way. More precisely, we describe a family of layouts of polyhedral flat tori, with 2 discrete and 2 continuous parameters; each layout is the fundamental domain of a lattice tiling of the plane. The main ingredient of the construction is a rather non-intuitive approximation of a one-sheet hyperboloid by a piecewise linear surface, that we call a ploid. As built up from two ploids, we call these tori, diplotori. We prove that all moduli of tori are attained. Moreover, we give a method to obtain a diplotorus realisation of any given modulus, and in particular we give explicit parameters for the square flat torus, and the regular hexagon torus. In doing this, we go further than the independent description of diplotori by Tsuboi (arxiv:2007.03434)."