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Steffen's Flexible Polyhedron

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Steffen's polyhedron is able to flex without self-intersection and without distorting any of its faces. It has 14 triangular faces, 21 edges, and 9 vertices. Euler had conjectured no polyhedron could flex. Cauchy proved that convex polyhedra cannot flex.

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The bellows conjecture (proven in 1997) asserts that a flexible polyhedron has constant volume as it is flexed.

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Contributed by: Mark McClure (April 2007)
With additional contribution by Izidor Hafner.
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

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Details

R. Connelly, I. Sabitov, and A. Walz, "The Bellows Conjecture," Contrib. Algebra Geom. 38, pp. 1–10, 1997.

Reference

[1] P. R. Cromwell, Polyhedra, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 245 and 247, 1997.

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