An intrinsic characterization of foldings of Euclidean space (Q1122779)

A folding shall be a non-expansive, piecewise isometric mapping \(q\colon \mathbb R^d\to \mathbb R^d\) with pieces forming a polyhedral decomposition of the space. As an illustration (not every folding on \(\mathbb R^2\) is a paper folding in the following sense), imagine that a piece of paper is folded several times, translated, flipped or rotated arbitrarily. Thus, a mapping \(q\colon \mathbb R^2\to \mathbb R^2\) is defined. In this way the plane is divided into (possibly unbounded) polygonal domains such that the restriction of \(q\) to each domain is an isometry. With respect to the edge-neighbouring relation, these domains (folds) can be two-colored, i.e. divided into two classes \(A\), \(B\). It is easy to see that at each vertex the angle-sum of polygons from \(A\) is equal to that from \(B\). The main topic of the paper is to show that this angle-sum property characterizes the class of foldings and that it generalizes to \(\mathbb R^d\).