On an elementary proof of Rivin's characterization of convex ideal hyperbolic polyhedra by their dihedral angles (Q1768254)

A well-known question of J. Steiner (1832) refers to the characterization of those planar graphs which are combinatorially equivalent to 3-polytopes all whose vertices are contained in the standard 2-sphere in 3-space. (In the Beltrami-Klein model for the hyperbolic 3-space \(H^3\) such polyhedra can also be interpreted as hyperbolic polyhedra all whose vertices are on the sphere at infinity, also called ideal hyperbolic polyhedra.) As a byproduct of the classification of ideal polyhedra in \(H^3\), I. Rivin answered Steiner's question in the 1990s, proposing also a more direct approach to these results. Presenting a suitable combinatorial result in the spirit of ``combinatorial angles'', the author of the present paper completes the program of Rivin, although (as he expresses in a footnote) already Rivin himself gave this completion in a paper that first was not known to him, by using network flow analysis and duality between linear programs.