Cauchy's famous rigidity theorem for 3D convex polyhedra has been extended in various directions by Dehn, Weyl, A.D.Alexandrov, Gluck and Connelly. These results imply that a disk-like polyhedral surface with simplicial faces is, generically, flexible, if the boundary has at least 4 vertices. What about surfaces with rigid but not necessarily simplicial faces? A natural, albeit extreme family is given by flat-faced origamis.
Around 1995, Robert Lang, a well-known origamist, proposed a method for designing a crease pattern on a flat piece of paper such that it has an isometric flat-folded realization with an underlying, predetermined metric tree structure. Important mathematical properties of this algorithm remain elusive to this day.
In this talk I will show that Lang's beautiful method leads, most often, to a crease pattern that cannot be continuously deformed to the desired flat- folded shape if its faces are to be kept rigid. Most surprisingly, sometimes the initial crease pattern is simply rigid: the (real) configuration space of such a structure may be disconnected, with one of the components being an isolated point.
This is joint work with my student John Bowers, who also implemented a very nice program to visualize what is going on.