The carpenter's rule problem is a discrete geometry problem, which can be stated in the following manner: Can a simple planar polygon be moved continuously to a position where all its vertices are in convex position, so that the edge lengths and simplicity are preserved along the way? A closely related problem is to show that any non-self-crossing polygonal chain can be straightened, again by a continuous transformation that preserves edge distances and avoids crossings.
Both problems were successfully solved by Connelly, Demaine & Rote (2003).
The problem is named after the multiple-jointed wooden rulers popular among carpenters in the 19th and early 20th centuries before improvements to metal tape measures made them obsolete.
Subsequently, to their work, Ileana Streinu provided a simplified combinatorial proof formulated in the terminology of robot arm motion planning. Both the original proof and Streinu's proof work by finding non-expansive motions of the input, continuous transformations such that no two points ever move towards each other. Streinu's version of the proof adds edges to the input to form a pointed pseudotriangulation, removes one added convex hull edge from this graph, and shows that the remaining graph has a one-parameter family of motions in which all distances are nondecreasing. By repeatedly applying such motions, one eventually reaches a state in which no further expansive motions are possible, which can only happen when the input has been straightened or convexified.
Streinu & Whiteley (2005) provide an application of this result to the mathematics of paper folding: they describe how to fold any single-vertex origami shape using only simple non-self-intersecting motions of the paper. Essentially, this folding process is a time-reversed version of the problem of convexifying a polygon of length smaller than π, but on the surface of a sphere rather than in the Euclidean plane. This result was extended by Panina & Streinu (2010) for spherical polygons of edge length smaller than 2π.
JohnPardon ( 2009 ) generalized the Carpenter's rule problem to rectifiable curves. He showed that every rectifiable Jordan curve can be made convex, without increasing its length and without decreasing the distance between any pair of points. This research, performed while he was still a high school student, won the second-place prize for Pardon in the 2007 Intel Science Talent Search ( Cunningham 2007 ).
In geometry, a polyhedron is a three-dimensional figure with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices.
The discipline of origami or paper folding has received a considerable amount of mathematical study. Fields of interest include a given paper model's flat-foldability, and the use of paper folds to solve up-to cubic mathematical equations.
A Euclidean minimum spanning tree of a finite set of points in the Euclidean plane or higher-dimensional Euclidean space connects the points by a system of line segments with the points as endpoints, minimizing the total length of the segments. In it, any two points can reach each other along a path through the line segments. It can be found as the minimum spanning tree of a complete graph with the points as vertices and the Euclidean distances between points as edge weights.
In geometry, a simple polygon is a polygon that does not intersect itself and has no holes. That is, it is a piecewise-linear Jordan curve consisting of finitely many line segments. These polygons include as special cases the convex polygons, star-shaped polygons, and monotone polygons.
In geometry, a net of a polyhedron is an arrangement of non-overlapping edge-joined polygons in the plane which can be folded to become the faces of the polyhedron. Polyhedral nets are a useful aid to the study of polyhedra and solid geometry in general, as they allow for physical models of polyhedra to be constructed from material such as thin cardboard.
The art gallery problem or museum problem is a well-studied visibility problem in computational geometry. It originates from the following real-world problem:
"In an art gallery, what is the minimum number of guards who together can observe the whole gallery?"
In geometry, a straight skeleton is a method of representing a polygon by a topological skeleton. It is similar in some ways to the medial axis but differs in that the skeleton is composed of straight line segments, while the medial axis of a polygon may involve parabolic curves. However, both are homotopy-equivalent to the underlying polygon.
In Euclidean plane geometry, a pseudotriangle (pseudo-triangle) is the simply connected subset of the plane that lies between any three mutually tangent convex sets. A pseudotriangulation (pseudo-triangulations) is a partition of a region of the plane into pseudotriangles, and a pointed pseudotriangulation is a pseudotriangulation in which at each vertex the incident edges span an angle of less than π.
In geometry, a vertex is a point where two or more curves, lines, or edges meet or intersect. As a consequence of this definition, the point where two lines meet to form an angle and the corners of polygons and polyhedra are vertices.
The dynamic convex hull problem is a class of dynamic problems in computational geometry. The problem consists in the maintenance, i.e., keeping track, of the convex hull for input data undergoing a sequence of discrete changes, i.e., when input data elements may be inserted, deleted, or modified. It should be distinguished from the kinetic convex hull, which studies similar problems for continuously moving points. Dynamic convex hull problems may be distinguished by the types of the input data and the allowed types of modification of the input data.
In polyhedral combinatorics, a branch of mathematics, Steinitz's theorem is a characterization of the undirected graphs formed by the edges and vertices of three-dimensional convex polyhedra: they are exactly the 3-vertex-connected planar graphs. That is, every convex polyhedron forms a 3-connected planar graph, and every 3-connected planar graph can be represented as the graph of a convex polyhedron. For this reason, the 3-connected planar graphs are also known as polyhedral graphs.
The Erdős–Nagy theorem is a result in discrete geometry stating that a non-convex simple polygon can be made into a convex polygon by a finite sequence of flips. The flips are defined by taking a convex hull of a polygon and reflecting a pocket with respect to the boundary edge. The theorem is named after mathematicians Paul Erdős and Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy.
The Alexandrov uniqueness theorem is a rigidity theorem in mathematics, describing three-dimensional convex polyhedra in terms of the distances between points on their surfaces. It implies that convex polyhedra with distinct shapes from each other also have distinct metric spaces of surface distances, and it characterizes the metric spaces that come from the surface distances on polyhedra. It is named after Soviet mathematician Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov, who published it in the 1940s.
Ileana Streinu is a Romanian-American computer scientist and mathematician, the Charles N. Clark Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Smith College in Massachusetts. She is known for her research in computational geometry, and in particular for her work on kinematics and structural rigidity.
In the mathematics of structural rigidity, a rigidity matroid is a matroid that describes the number of degrees of freedom of an undirected graph with rigid edges of fixed lengths, embedded into Euclidean space. In a rigidity matroid for a graph with n vertices in d-dimensional space, a set of edges that defines a subgraph with k degrees of freedom has matroid rank dn − k. A set of edges is independent if and only if, for every edge in the set, removing the edge would increase the number of degrees of freedom of the remaining subgraph.
In discrete geometry, an opaque set is a system of curves or other set in the plane that blocks all lines of sight across a polygon, circle, or other shape. Opaque sets have also been called barriers, beam detectors, opaque covers, or opaque forests. Opaque sets were introduced by Stefan Mazurkiewicz in 1916, and the problem of minimizing their total length was posed by Frederick Bagemihl in 1959.
In discrete geometry and computational geometry, the convex hull of a simple polygon is the polygon of minimum perimeter that contains a given simple polygon. It is a special case of the more general concept of a convex hull. It can be computed in linear time, faster than algorithms for convex hulls of point sets.
Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra is a monograph on the mathematics and computational geometry of mechanical linkages, paper folding, and polyhedral nets, by Erik Demaine and Joseph O'Rourke. It was published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press (ISBN 978-0-521-85757-4). A Japanese-language translation by Ryuhei Uehara was published in 2009 by the Modern Science Company (ISBN 978-4-7649-0377-7).
In computational geometry, the star unfolding of a convex polyhedron is a net obtained by cutting the polyhedron along geodesics through its faces. It has also been called the inward layout of the polyhedron, or the Alexandrov unfolding after Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov, who first considered it.
In the geometry of convex polyhedra, blooming or continuous blooming is a continuous three-dimensional motion of the surface of the polyhedron, cut to form a polyhedral net, from the polyhedron into a flat and non-self-overlapping placement of the net in a plane. As in rigid origami, the polygons of the net must remain individually flat throughout the motion, and are not allowed to intersect or cross through each other. A blooming, reversed to go from the flat net to a polyhedron, can be thought of intuitively as a way to fold the polyhedron from a paper net without bending the paper except at its designated creases.