A universal triangulation for flat tori

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Abstract: A result due to Burago and Zalgaller states that every orientable polyhedral surface, one that is obtained by gluing Euclidean polygons, has an isometric piecewise linear (PL) embedding into Euclidean space mathbbE3. A flat torus, resulting from the identification of the opposite sides of a Euclidean parallelogram, is a simple example of polyhedral surface. In a first part, we adapt the proof of Burago and Zalgaller, which is partially constructive, to produce PL isometric embeddings of flat tori. In practice, the resulting embeddings have a huge number of vertices, moreover distinct for every flat torus. In a second part, based on another construction of Zalgaller and on recent works by Arnoux et al., we exhibit a universal triangulation with 5974 triangles which can be embedded linearly on each triangle in order to realize the metric of any flat torus.


The paper constructs a triangulation of the torus that is universal with respect to isometric simplicial embeddings into the 3-space, in the following sense. Theorem. For any real \(a,b>0\) denote by \(T_{a,b}\) the torus (as metric space) obtained by identifying opposite sides of the \(a\times b\)-rectangle. There is a simplicial complex whose body is homeomorphic to the 2-dimensional torus, which has 2434 triangles, and which for any real \(a,b>0\) admits an embedding in the 3-space, that is linear on every simplex, and whose image is isometric to \(T_{a,b}\). This result continues research of Yu. Burago, V. Zalgaller, T. Tsuboi, P. Arnoux, S. Lelièvre, A. Málaga, and others, as explained in the introduction. The proof contains both interesting ideas and technical calculations involving complex numbers.











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