Rigidity of Circle Packings with Crosscuts

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Circle packings with specified patterns of tangencies form a discrete counterpart of analytic functions. In this paper we study univalent packings (with a combinatorial closed disk as tangent graph) which are embedded in (or fill) a bounded, simply connected domain. We introduce the concept of crosscuts and investigate the rigidity of circle packings with respect to maximal crosscuts. The main result is a discrete version of an indentity theorem for analytic functions (in the spirit of Schwarz' Lemma), which has implications to uniqueness statements for discrete conformal mappings.