Rigidity of ball-polyhedra in Euclidean 3-space (Q819011)

A ball-polyhedron, created by \(n\geq 3\) closed congruent balls in Euclidean 3-space, can be defined in the following way: Assume that the intersection \(P\) of these balls is nonempty and becomes a larger set if one of the balls is removed; then \(P\) is said to be a ball-polyhedron. After suitably defining the face lattice and the inner dihedral angles of ball-polyhedra (e.g., with circular intersection arcs as edges, etc.), the authors prove rigidity theorems, in the spirit of Cauchy's famous rigidity theorem, for triangulated ball-polyhedra (i.e., any face of \(P\) is bounded by three edges) and a special case of simple ball-polyhedra. They also give the Euler-Poincaré theorem for ball-polyhedra and a duality statement.