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Unpublished Paper
There is no triangulation of the torus with vertex degrees 5, 6, . . ., 6, 7 and related results: Geometric proofs for combinatorial theorems
Geometriae Dedicata (2012)
  • Ivan Izmestiev
  • Robert B. Kusner, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
  • Günter Rote
  • Boris Springborn
  • John M. Sullivan
Abstract

There is no 5,7-triangulation of the torus, that is, no triangulation with exactly two exceptional vertices, of degree 5 and 7. Similarly, there is no 3,5-quadrangulation. The vertices of a 2,4-hexangulation of the torus cannot be bicolored. Similar statements hold for 4,8-triangulations and 2,6-quadrangulations. We prove these results, of which the first two are known and the others seem to be new, as corollaries of a theorem on the holonomy group of a euclidean cone metric on the torus with just two cone points. We provide two proofs of this theorem: One argument is metric in nature, the other relies on the induced conformal structure and proceeds by invoking the residue theorem. Similar methods can be used to prove a theorem of Dress on infinite triangulations of the plane with exactly two irregular vertices. The non-existence results for torus decompositions provide infinite families of graphs which cannot be embedded in the torus.

Keywords
  • Torus triangulation,
  • Euclidean cone metric,
  • Holonomy,
  • Meromorphic differential,
  • Residue theorem,
  • Burgers vector
Publication Date
September 18, 2012
Comments
Pre-published version downloaded from archive ArXiv.org. Published version located at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10711-012-9782-5.
Citation Information
Ivan Izmestiev, Robert B. Kusner, Günter Rote, Boris Springborn, et al.. "There is no triangulation of the torus with vertex degrees 5, 6, . . ., 6, 7 and related results: Geometric proofs for combinatorial theorems" Geometriae Dedicata (2012)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/robert_kusner/13/