A Universal Triangulation for Flat Tori

Abstract

A result due to Burago and Zalgaller states that every orientable polyhedral surface, one that is obtained by gluing Euclidean polygons, has an isometric piecewise linear (PL) embedding into Euclidean space 𝔼³. A flat torus, resulting from the identification of the opposite sides of a Euclidean parallelogram, is a simple example of polyhedral surface. In a first part, we adapt the proof of Burago and Zalgaller, which is partially constructive, to produce PL isometric embeddings of flat tori. In practice, the resulting embeddings have a huge number of vertices, moreover distinct for every flat torus. In a second part, based on another construction of Zalgaller and on recent works by Arnoux et al., we exhibit a universal triangulation with 5974 triangles which can be embedded linearly on each triangle in order to realize the metric of any flat torus.