Symmetries of 3-polytopes with fixed edge lengths

Abstract

We consider an interesting class of combinatorial symmetries of polytopes which we call \emph{edge-length preserving combinatorial symmetries}. These symmetries not only preserve the combinatorial structure of a polytope but also map each edge of the polytope to an edge of the same length. We prove a simple sufficient condition for a polytope to realize all edge-length preserving combinatorial symmetries by isometries of ambient space. The proof of this condition uses Cauchy's rigidity theorem in an unusual way.