Closed simple geodesics on a polyhedron
preprint
OA: closed
CC-BY-4.0
Abstract
It is well-known that every isosceles tetrahedron (disphenoid) admits infinitely many simple closed geodesics on its surface. They can be naturally enumerated by pairs of coprime integers n > m > 1 with two additional cases (1, 0) and (1, 1). The (n, m)- geodesic is a broken line with 4(n+ m) vertices, its length tends to infinity as m → ∞. Are there other polyhedra possessing this property? The answer depends on convexity. We give an elementary proof that among convex polyhedra only disphenoids admit arbitrarily long closed simple geodesics. For non-convex polyhedra, this is not true. We present a counterexample with the corresponding polyhedron being a union of seven equal cubes. Several open problems are formulated.
My notes (saved in your browser only)
Citation neighborhood (no data yet)
We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. The paper's references may be in our DB but unresolved to ``paper_id`` (resolution happens at ingest when the cited DOI matches a row we already have). Run the cross-source citation reconcile pass to retry.
Source provenance
- europepmc
- last seen: 2026-05-19T01:45:01.086888+00:00
- unpaywall
- last seen: 2026-05-22T02:00:06.705733+00:00
License: CC-BY-4.0