A characterization of the angle defect and the Euler characteristic in dimension 2

DOI10.1007/S00454-008-9084-8zbMATH Open1189.52010arXiv0708.2506OpenAlexW2134116433MaRDI QIDQ848853FDOQ848853

Ethan D. Bloch

Publication date: 23 February 2010

Published in: Discrete \& Computational Geometry (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The angle defect, which is the standard way to measure curvature at the vertices of polyhedral surfaces, goes back at least as far as Descartes. Although the angle defect has been widely studied, there does not appear to be in the literature an axiomatic characterization of the angle defect. We give a characterization of the angle defect for simplicial surfaces, and we show that variants of the same characterization work for two known approaches to generalizing the angle defect to arbitrary 2-dimensional simplicial complexes. Simultaneously, we give a characterization of the Euler characteristic on 2-dimensional simplicial complexes in terms of being geometrically locally determined.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.2506

Recommendations

• The angle defect for arbitrary polyhedra
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zbMATH Keywords

simplicial complexesEuler characteristicangle defect

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Combinatorial properties of polytopes and polyhedra (number of faces, shortest paths, etc.) (52B05) Polyhedral manifolds (52B70)

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Cited In (6)

• Critical points and the angle defect
• Curvature analysis of frequency modulated manifolds in dimensionality reduction
• Pseudo-Angle Systems and the Simplicial Gauss–Bonnet–Chern Theorem
• An overview of curvature bounds and spectral theory of planar tessellations
• Duality and the Descartes deficiency
• The angle defect for odd-dimensional simplicial manifolds

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