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Alexandrov's uniqueness theorem
Summary
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.
The surface of any convex polyhedron in Euclidean space forms a metric space, in which the distance between two points is measured by the length of the shortest path from one point to the other along the surface. Within a single shortest path, distances between pairs of points equal the distances between corresponding points of a line segment of the same length; a path with this property is known as a geodesic.
This property of polyhedral surfaces, that every pair of points is connected by a geodesic, is not true of many other metric spaces, and when it is true the space is called a geodesic space. The geodesic space formed from the surface of a polyhedron is called its development.
The polyhedron can be thought of as being folded from a sheet of paper (a net for the polyhedron) and it inherits the same geometry as the paper: for every point p within a face of the polyhedron, a sufficiently small open neighborhood of p will have the same distances as a subset of the Euclidean plane. The same thing is true even for points on the edges of the polyhedron: they can be modeled locally as a Euclidean plane folded along a line and embedded into three-dimensional space, but the fold does not change the structure of shortest paths along the surface. However, the vertices of the polyhedron have a different distance structure: the local geometry of a polyhedron vertex is the same as the local geometry at the apex of a cone. Any cone can be formed from a flat sheet of paper with a wedge removed from it by gluing together the cut edges where the wedge was removed.
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