Number of faces

[edit]

Polyhedra may be classified and are often named according to the number of faces.
The naming system is based on Classical Greek, and combines a prefix counting the
faces with the suffix "hedron", meaning "base" or "seat" and referring to the faces. For
example a tetrahedron is a polyhedron with four faces, a pentahedron is a polyhedron
with five faces, a hexahedron is a polyhedron with six faces, etc.[29] For a complete list of
the Greek numeral prefixes see Numeral prefix § Table of number prefixes in English, in
the column for Greek cardinal numbers. The names of tetrahedra, hexahedra,
octahedra (8-sided polyhedra), dodecahedra (12-sided polyhedra), and icosahedra (20-
sided polyhedra) are sometimes used without additional qualification to refer to
the Platonic solids, and sometimes used to refer more generally to polyhedra with the
given number of sides without any assumption of symmetry.[30]

Topological classification
[edit]

Main article: Toroidal polyhedron

The tetrahemihexahedron, a non-orientable self-intersecting

polyhedron with four triangular faces (red) and three square faces (yellow). As with a Möbius
strip or Klein bottle, a continuous path along the surface of this polyhedron can reach the point on the
opposite side of the surface from its starting point, making it impossible to separate the surface into an
inside and an outside. (Topologically, this polyhedron is a real projective plane.)

Some polyhedra have two distinct sides to their surface. For example, the inside and
outside of a convex polyhedron paper model can each be given a different colour
(although the inside colour will be hidden from view). These polyhedra are orientable.
The same is true for non-convex polyhedra without self-crossings. Some non-convex
self-crossing polyhedra can be coloured in the same way but have regions turned
"inside out" so that both colours appear on the outside in different places; these are still
considered to be orientable. However, for some other self-crossing polyhedra with
simple-polygon faces, such as the tetrahemihexahedron, it is not possible to colour the
two sides of each face with two different colours so that adjacent faces have consistent
colours. In this case the polyhedron is said to be non-orientable. For polyhedra with self-
crossing faces, it may not be clear what it means for adjacent faces to be consistently
coloured, but for these polyhedra it is still possible to determine whether it is orientable
or non-orientable by considering a topological cell complex with the same incidences
between its vertices, edges, and faces.[31]

A more subtle distinction between polyhedron surfaces is given by their Euler

characteristic, which combines the numbers of vertices , edges , and

faces of a polyhedron into a single number defined by the formula

The same formula is also used for the Euler characteristic of other kinds of
topological surfaces. It is an invariant of the surface, meaning that when a single
surface is subdivided into vertices, edges, and faces in more than one way, the
Euler characteristic will be the same for these subdivisions. For a convex
polyhedron, or more generally any simply connected polyhedron with surface a
topological sphere, it always equals 2. For more complicated shapes, the Euler
characteristic relates to the number of toroidal holes, handles or cross-caps in the
surface and will be less than 2.[32] All polyhedra with odd-numbered Euler
characteristic are non-orientable. A given figure with even Euler characteristic may
or may not be orientable. For example, the one-holed toroid and the Klein

bottle both have , with the first being orientable and the other not.[31]

For many (but not all) ways of defining polyhedra, the surface of the polyhedron is
required to be a manifold. This means that every edge is part of the boundary of
exactly two faces (disallowing shapes like the union of two cubes that meet only
along a shared edge) and that every vertex is incident to a single alternating cycle of
edges and faces (disallowing shapes like the union of two cubes sharing only a
single vertex). For polyhedra defined in these ways, the classification of
manifolds implies that the topological type of the surface is completely determined
by the combination of its Euler characteristic and orientability. For example, every
polyhedron whose surface is an orientable manifold and whose Euler characteristic
is 2 must be a topological sphere.[31]

A toroidal polyhedron is a polyhedron whose Euler characteristic is less than or

equal to 0, or equivalently whose genus is 1 or greater. Topologically, the surfaces
of such polyhedra are torus surfaces having one or more holes through the
middle.[33]

Duality
[edit]

Main article: Dual polyhedron

 The octahedron is dual to the cube

For every convex polyhedron, there exists a dual polyhedron having

 faces in place of the original's vertices and vice versa, and

 the same number of edges.
The dual of a convex polyhedron can be obtained by the process of polar
reciprocation.[34] Dual polyhedra exist in pairs, and the dual of a dual is just the
original polyhedron again. Some polyhedra are self-dual, meaning that the dual of
the polyhedron is congruent to the original polyhedron.[35]

Abstract polyhedra also have duals, obtained by reversing the partial order defining
the polyhedron to obtain its dual or opposite order.[13] These have the same Euler
characteristic and orientability as the initial polyhedron. However, this form of duality
does not describe the shape of a dual polyhedron, but only its combinatorial
structure. For some definitions of non-convex geometric polyhedra, there exist
polyhedra whose abstract duals cannot be realized as geometric polyhedra under
the same definition.[10]

Vertex figures
[edit]

Main article: Vertex figure

For every vertex one can define a vertex figure, which describes the local structure
of the polyhedron around the vertex. Precise definitions vary, but a vertex figure can
be thought of as the polygon exposed where a slice through the polyhedron cuts off
a vertex.[8] For the Platonic solids and other highly-symmetric polyhedra, this slice
may be chosen to pass through the midpoints of each edge incident to the
vertex,[36] but other polyhedra may not have a plane through these points. For
convex polyhedra, and more generally for polyhedra whose vertices are in convex
position, this slice can be chosen as any plane separating the vertex from the other
vertices.[37] When the polyhedron has a center of symmetry, it is standard to choose
this plane to be perpendicular to the line through the given vertex and the
center;[38] with this choice, the shape of the vertex figure is determined up to scaling.
When the vertices of a polyhedron are not in convex position, there will not always
be a plane separating each vertex from the rest. In this case, it is common instead to
slice the polyhedron by a small sphere centered at the vertex.[39] Again, this
produces a shape for the vertex figure that is invariant up to scaling. All of these
choices lead to vertex figure