Determining triangulations and quadrangulations by boundary distances

Abstract

We show that if a disc triangulation has all internal vertex degrees at least 6, then the full triangulation may be determined from the pairwise graph distance between boundary vertices. A similar result holds for quadrangulations with all internal degrees at least 4. This confirms a conjecture of Itai Benjamini. Both degree bounds are best possible, and correspond to local non-positive curvature. However, we show that a natural conjecture for a "mixed" version of the two results is not true.