An explicit mono-monostatic polyhedron
Abstract
A convex body is mono-monostatic if, resting under gravity on a horizontal plane, it has exactly one stable and one unstable equilibrium position. Smooth mono-monostatic homogeneous bodies exist (the Gömböc of Domokos and Várkonyi), and Lángi proved that (homogeneous) mono-monostatic polyhedra exist; although no explicit example appears to have been published, to the author's knowledge. We construct explicitly two such mono-monostatic polytopes, the smaller one having $56946$ faces; importantly, we certify them: the polytope is presented as an intersection of half-spaces with rational data, and a certifying verification establishes, using exact rational arithmetic for every decisive comparison, that the body has equilibrium signature (S,H,U)=(1,0,1) with respect to its own exact centroid, with explicit nondegeneracy margins. We describe the geometric obstructions that make naive discretisations of smooth mono-monostatic bodies fail, the adaptive construction that overcomes them, and the certification strategy. While the result itself is not strikingly novel, we emphasise the non-standard (but increasingly more common) methodology: the entire programme, i.e. experiments, constructions and the verifier itself, was implemented by AI agents under human mathematical direction. We argue that exact certification of numerically discovered objects is the natural contract between such AI-assisted workflows and mathematical standards of rigour.
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BibTeX
@misc{gherardini2026explicit,
title = {{An explicit mono-monostatic polyhedron}},
author = {Tancredi Schettini Gherardini},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.07827},
eprint = {2609.07827},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07827},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - An explicit mono-monostatic polyhedron
AU - Tancredi Schettini Gherardini
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/07
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.07827
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07827
AB - A convex body is mono-monostatic if, resting under gravity on a horizontal plane, it has exactly one stable and one unstable equilibrium position. Smooth mono-monostatic homogeneous bodies exist (the Gömböc of Domokos and Várkonyi), and Lángi proved that (homogeneous) mono-monostatic polyhedra exist; although no explicit example appears to have been published, to the author's knowledge. We construct explicitly two such mono-monostatic polytopes, the smaller one having $56946$ faces; importantly, we certify them: the polytope is presented as an intersection of half-spaces with rational data, and a certifying verification establishes, using exact rational arithmetic for every decisive comparison, that the body has equilibrium signature (S,H,U)=(1,0,1) with respect to its own exact centroid, with explicit nondegeneracy margins. We describe the geometric obstructions that make naive discretisations of smooth mono-monostatic bodies fail, the adaptive construction that overcomes them, and the certification strategy. While the result itself is not strikingly novel, we emphasise the non-standard (but increasingly more common) methodology: the entire programme, i.e. experiments, constructions and the verifier itself, was implemented by AI agents under human mathematical direction. We argue that exact certification of numerically discovered objects is the natural contract between such AI-assisted workflows and mathematical standards of rigour.
ER -