Published October 29, 2026 | Version 1

A Torus with Eleven Convex Quadrilateral Faces

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Description

Grünbaum and Szilassi conjectured in 2009 that a toroidal polyhedron cannot have ten or eleven convex quadrilateral faces. We give an explicit counterexample with eleven faces and eleven integer vertices. Every face is planar and strictly convex, adjacent faces lie in different planes, and distinct faces meet in their prescribed common edge or vertex, or are disjoint. The construction has a simple geometric interpretation: remove two triangular caps from a convex polyhedron and join their boundaries with the three walls of an interior triangular prism. We describe the direct search route, the passage from numerical coordinates to exact incidences, and the geometric certificate. A small standalone package verifies the witness using rational arithmetic and no third-party libraries.

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Subtitle (English)
An exact counterexample to Conjecture 3.2 of Grünbaum and Szilassi

References

  • B. Grünbaum and L. Szilassi. Geometric realizations of special toroidal complexes. Contributions to Discrete Mathematics 4(1) (2009), 21–39. Definitions, pp. 21–22; Proposition 3.1 and Conjecture 3.2, pp. 23–24. DOI: 10.55016/ojs/cdm.v4i1.61986.
  • L. Szilassi. Regular toroids. Structural Topology 13 (1986), 69–80.
  • U. Brehm and W. Kühnel. Equivelar maps on the torus. European Journal of Combinatorics 29(8) (2008), 1843–1861. DOI: 10.1016/j.ejc.2008.01.010.
  • S. Lawrencenko. Geometric realization of toroidal quadrangulations without hidden symmetries. Geombinatorics 24(1) (2014), 11–20. arXiv:1307.1054.