24-cell
The 24-cell, also known as the icositetrachoron, octaplex, or hyperdiamond, is a convex regular four-dimensional polytope with Schläfli symbol {3,4,3}.[1] It consists of 24 regular octahedral cells, 96 equilateral triangular faces, 96 edges, and 24 vertices, making it one of the six convex regular 4-polytopes.[1][2] Unlike the other regular 4-polytopes, which have analogues among the Platonic solids in three dimensions, the 24-cell is unique in lacking a direct three-dimensional counterpart.[3] It is self-dual, meaning it is combinatorially and geometrically congruent to its dual polytope.[1][2] The vertices of the 24-cell can be coordinatized in four-dimensional Euclidean space using all 24 points obtained from permutations of (±1, ±1, 0, 0) with all sign combinations for the non-zero entries, yielding a circumradius of √2 and edge length of √2.[1] These coordinates lie on a 3-sphere of radius √2. The vertices can also be represented using the 24 Hurwitz integers of unit norm in the quaternions (corresponding to coordinates of radius 1).[2] The symmetry group of the 24-cell is the Coxeter group F₄, a Weyl group of order 1152 that acts transitively on the flags of the polytope.[4] This group includes rotations and reflections, with the rotational subgroup of index 2.[5] The 24-cell was discovered by Swiss mathematician Ludwig Schläfli between 1850 and 1852 as part of his pioneering work on higher-dimensional geometry, where he identified the six regular convex 4-polytopes.[3][6] Its combinatorial and geometric structure has since been extensively studied, notably by H.S.M. Coxeter, for applications in lattice theory, sphere packings, and exceptional Lie groups.[7]History and nomenclature
Discovery and early studies
The 24-cell was first discovered by Swiss mathematician Ludwig Schläfli between 1850 and 1852 during his enumeration of regular polytopes in arbitrary dimensions, where he identified six convex regular 4-polytopes, including the one composed of 24 regular octahedra.[3] His work was published posthumously in 1901.[3] In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, interest in visualizing 4-dimensional geometry led to independent work by self-taught mathematician Alicia Boole Stott, who around 1900 constructed intricate paper models of 3-dimensional sections of all six regular 4-polytopes, including the 24-cell, demonstrating their structure without prior knowledge of Schläfli's results.[3] Shortly thereafter, in 1900, British mathematician and lawyer Thorold Gosset published a comprehensive classification of uniform 4-polytopes, in which he assigned the Schläfli symbol {3,4,3} to the 24-cell and enumerated its combinatorial properties as part of a broader catalog of semi-regular figures in higher dimensions.[3] Mid-20th-century advancements solidified the 24-cell's theoretical foundations through the work of H.S.M. Coxeter, who in the 1950s and 1960s performed detailed computational verifications of its geometry and symmetries, including calculations of the order of its full symmetry group as 1152 in his influential text Regular Polytopes (third edition, 1973).[1] Coxeter's analyses highlighted the 24-cell's unique position among regular polytopes, emphasizing its self-duality—a property evident from the palindromic Schläfli symbol {3,4,3}, where vertices correspond to the cells of its dual.Naming conventions and terminology
The 24-cell derives its primary name from its composition of 24 regular octahedral cells.[1] Alternative designations include the octaplex, a term shorthand for "octahedral complex" that highlights the 8-fold structural complexity arising from the octahedral building blocks and their arrangement.[8] The systematic Greek nomenclature icositetrachoron combines "icosi-" (indicating 20) and "-tetrachoron" (for 4-dimensional figure with 4 cells implied in the base), yielding a literal reference to its 24 cells.[1] The Schläfli symbol {3,4,3} compactly encodes the 24-cell's structure: the initial {3,4} specifies regular octahedral cells (equilateral triangular faces meeting four at each edge), while the trailing {4,3} describes the cubic vertex figure (square faces meeting three at each edge).[1] This notation distinguishes it within the family of regular 4-polytopes, emphasizing the alternation between tetrahedral and cubic elements in its facets and vertices. In Coxeter-Dynkin diagram notation, the 24-cell is represented by a linear chain of three nodes, with the bond between the first and second node marked by a label of 4 to indicate the specific dihedral angle, corresponding to the exceptional F4 Coxeter group of order 1152.[9] This graphical convention provides a visual summary of the symmetry relations among the generating reflections. Less common terms, such as tetracosichoron (from Greek roots evoking 24 cells), appear sporadically in early literature but have not gained widespread adoption. The nomenclature consistently applies to the regular convex form, distinguishing it from non-regular uniform variants like the truncated 24-cell, which features 48 cells comprising cubes and truncated octahedra rather than uniform octahedra.Definition and fundamental properties
Schläfli symbol and Coxeter-Dynkin diagram
The 24-cell, as a regular 4-polytope, is denoted by the Schläfli symbol {3,4,3}, which recursively specifies its structure starting from the faces. The symbol indicates that the 2-dimensional faces are equilateral triangles {3}, with three faces meeting at each edge to form regular octahedral 3-dimensional cells {3,4}; in turn, four such cells meet at each vertex, yielding regular cubic vertex figures {4,3}.[1][10] This construction ensures the polytope's regularity, meaning all its elements—faces, cells, and vertex figures—are congruent regular polytopes, and the arrangement is symmetric under the full symmetry group. The Coxeter-Dynkin diagram for the 24-cell consists of a linear arrangement of three nodes connected by bonds labeled 3 and 4, represented as o-3-o-4-o, where the nodes correspond to generating reflections and the bond labels denote the orders of the products of adjacent reflections in the Coxeter group.[9] This diagram defines the F_4 Coxeter group of order 1152, which acts as the full symmetry group of the 24-cell, preserving its regular structure. In lower dimensions, the analogous symbol {3,4} describes the regular octahedron, a 3-polytope with triangular faces and square vertex figures; the extension to {3,4,3} in four dimensions thus builds a self-dual polytope where cells and vertex figures are dual pairs (octahedron and cube). The regularity implied by these symbols confirms that the 24-cell is one of only six regular 4-polytopes, distinguished by its unique combination of tetrahedral symmetry in faces and octahedral/cubic elements in higher facets.[1] When embedded on a 3-sphere (the boundary of a 4-ball), the 24-cell satisfies the Euler characteristic for 4-dimensional polytopes, given by \chi = V - E + F - C = 24 - 96 + 96 - 24 = 0, where V, E, F, and C denote the numbers of vertices, edges, faces, and cells, respectively; this value of zero is characteristic of even-dimensional spherical topologies.[1]Vertex figure and basic counts
The 24-cell possesses 24 vertices, 96 edges, 96 triangular faces, and 24 regular octahedral cells. These counts reflect its status as a regular 4-polytope with Schläfli symbol {3,4,3}, where the cells are bounded by equilateral triangles meeting in octahedral configurations.[1][7] Combinatorial incidences among these elements are uniform due to the polytope's regularity. Each vertex is incident to 8 edges, 12 faces, and 6 cells. Each edge is incident to 2 vertices, 3 faces, and 3 cells. Each face is incident to 3 vertices, 3 edges, and 2 cells (as a triangle shared between two octahedral cells). Each cell is incident to 8 faces, 12 edges, 6 vertices, and is bounded by the appropriate adjacencies within its octahedral structure. These relations can be summarized in the following incidence table, where rows denote the number of lower-dimensional elements per higher one, and columns indicate the converse:| Element | Vertices | Edges | Faces | Cells |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vertices | - | 8 | 12 | 6 |
| Edges | 2 | - | 3 | 3 |
| Faces | 3 | 3 | - | 2 |
| Cells | 6 | 12 | 8 | - |