A characterization of affinely regular polygons

Abstract

In 1970, Coxeter gave a short and elegant geometric proof showing that if $p_1, p_2, \ldots , p_n$ are vertices of an n-gon P in cyclic order, then P is affinely regular if, and only if there is some $\lambda \ge 0$ such that $p_{j+2}-p_{j-1} = \lambda (p_{j+1}-p_j)$ for $j=1,2,\ldots , n$. The aim of this paper is to examine the properties of polygons whose vertices $p_1,p_2,\ldots ,p_n \in \mathbb {C}$ satisfy the property that $p_{j+m_1}-p_{j+m_2} = w (p_{j+k}-p_j)$ for some $w \in \mathbb {C}$ and $m_1,m_2,k \in \mathbb Z$. In particular, we show that in ‘most’ cases this implies that the polygon is affinely regular, but in some special cases there are polygons which satisfy this property but are not affinely regular. The proofs are based on the use of linear algebraic and number theoretic tools. In addition, we apply our method to characterize polytopes with certain symmetry groups.