Gluing affine 2-manifolds with polygons (Q1290869)

A well known theorem of Benzecri and Milnor states that a compact orientable affine surface is a two-torus. In this paper, the author studies the possible affine structures on a two-torus which are obtained by gluing simple polygons along their boundary curves. He gives an affine analogue of the Poincaré fundamental polygon theorem which allows to obtain the holonomy representation via the gluing data. As an affine structure is not a metric structure, this gluing data consist of specifying both, the fundamental polygon as well as the gluing transformations of the sides. The main result of the paper is that the deformation space of all complete affine structures on the two-torus is Hausdorff and homeomorphic to \(\mathbb{R}^2\). The author also shows that, with a suitable choice of the generators for the fundamental group of the torus, any complete affine structure on the torus can be obtained by gluing a simple convex quadrilateral along its opposite sides.