Rigidity of Polyhedral Surfaces

Abstract

We study rigidity of polyhedral surfaces and the moduli space of polyhedral surfaces using variational principles. Curvature like quantities for polyhedral surfaces are introduced. Many of them are shown to determine the polyhedral metric up to isometry. The action functionals in the variational approaches are derived from the cosine law and the Lengendre transformation of them. These include energies used by Colin de Verdiere, Braegger, Rivin, Cohen-Kenyon-Propp, Leibon and Bobenko-Springborn for variational principles on triangulated surfaces. Our study is based on a set of identities satisfied by the derivative of the cosine law. These identities which exhibit similarity in all spaces of constant curvature are probably a discrete analogous of the Bianchi identity.