Schläfli symbol

Schläfli symbols are a notation used to represent regular polytopes. The succinctly describe regular polytopes including regular Euclidean tilings and regular hyperbolic tilings, as well as the more ordinary spherical polytopes. Various extensions to Schläfli symbols exist to represent wider arrays of polytopes.

Description
A Schläfli symbol consists of several numbers in sequence (usually separated by commas) enclosed within curly brackets. The numbers can be positive integers, fully reduced positive fractions, or infinity. The simplest Schläfli symbols just use positive integers. These simple Schläfli symbols can be defined recursively. As a base case, $$\{\}$$ is the dyad, and $$\{n\}$$ is a regular $n$-gon. Then for rank 3 and higher the a symbol $$\{p_1, p_2, p_3, \dots, p_{n-1}, p_n\}$$ is a tiling of polytopes with the symbol $$\{p_1, p_2, p_3, dots , p_{n-1}\}$$ with $$p_n$$ of them placed around each $$n-2$$ element. For example, the dodecahedron is $$\{5,3\}$$. That means its faces are $$\{5\}$$, i.e. pentagons, and there are $3$ of them around each vertex. $$\{4,3,4\}$$ describes a regular polychoron with 4 cubes around each edge, i.e. a cubic honeycomb.

Although useful for picturing things, instead of counting the number of facets around elements this can be done in terms of vertex figures. As before $$\{\}$$ is the dyad, and $$\{n\}$$ is a regular $n$-gon, however additionally $$\left\{\frac n m\right\}$$ is a star polygon with $n$ vertices with each vertex connected by an edge to the vertices $m$ steps away. Note that $$\left\{\frac n 1\right\}$$ is exactly equivalent to $$\{n\}$$. Then for higher dimensions the symbol $$\{p_1,p_2,p_3,\dots,p_n\}$$ represents the polytope with faces of $$\{p_1\}$$ and a vertex figure of $$\{p_2,p_3,\dots,p_n\}$$. That is the first value gives the face of the polytope and the rest of the values are the vertex figure. This allows for polytopes like the great dodecahedron which has the symbol $$\left\{5,\frac 5 2\right\}$$.

Conversion to Coxeter-Dynkin diagrams
Schläfli symbols can be easily converted to a Coxeter-Dynkin diagram. A regular polytope has linear Coxeter-Dynkin diagram with the only the first node ringed, so to convert a Schläfli symbol to a Coxeter-Dynkin diagram you create a linear diagram with the first node ringed and then label the edges in between with the values of the Schläfli symbol in order. The Schläfli symbol $$\{n,m,\dots,z\}$$ becomes the diagram .... This includes cases where the Schläfli symbol has fractional or infinite values.

Extended Schläfli symbols
Many extensions to the basic Schläfli symbols exist. These extensions allow symbols to represent more regular polytopes or other classes of polytope altogether.

Coxeter's extension
Coxeter extended Schläfli symbols to represent quasiregular polytopes as well. Coxeter's extension allows Schläfli symbols to have up to two rows of values between the curly brackets. A single row still represents the same polytope. If the symbol has two rows it is converted to a Coxeter-Dynkin diagram with a single ringed node. The ringed node is placed on the right and two linear branches extend off to the left. Each value in the symbol is placed between two nodes, with values from the top row being placed on the top branch in order and values from the bottom row being placed on the bottom branch in order.

$$\left\{\begin{aligned}&p, r, t \\&q, s\end{aligned}\right\}$$ = =

Coxeter further even allowed thereby for bifurcation nodes in the diagram (as being used for the Gosset polytopes). Then any of the left-aligned number sequences might split up into two (or more) lines from some point on.

Wythoffian prefixes
Schläfli symbols have also been extended to represent Wythoffian polytopes using prefixes representing Wythoffian operations. In general any Wythoffian operation is assigned the prefix $t$ with some number of subscripts representing the indices of ringed nodes in the Coxeter-Dynkin diagram. Indices begin at 0 so $$t_0$$ rings the first node.

For example the cuboctahedron (CDD: ) has the symmetry group. So we start with the symbol $$\{4,3\}$$ (CDD: ) which has the same symmetry group, and add a prefix indicating that the second node of the Coxeter-Dynkin Diagram should be ringed, $$t_1\{4,3\}$$. These prefixes easily allow representing any linear Coxeter-Dynkin diagram as an extended Schläfli symbol.

For convenience a number of specific prefixes have shorter names.

Regular maps
Some extensions for Schläfli symbols exist for regular maps. Many regular maps can be written as $$\{p,q\}_r$$ indicating the polytope is $$\{p,q\}$$ with points that are $2r$ steps apart along a Petrie polygon identified. For example Petrial cube is has the symbol $$\{6,3\}_4$$ because its universal cover is $$\{6,3\}$$ and it can be obtained by identifying points which are 4 steps along its Petri polygons, which are in this case zigzags.

Projective polytopes
Since projective polytopes are a quotient of spherical polytope which identifying opposite points, the Schläfli symbol of a projective polytope is the Schläfli symbol of that spherical polytope with a subscript equal to half the number of vertices in the Petrie polygon.

Schläfli type
A Schläfli symbol $$\{p,q\}$$ indicates a regular polyhedron with $r$-gonal facets and a $rr$-gonal vertex figure. However in the domain of regular maps there may be multiple polyhedra with $t$-gonal facets and a $tr$-gonal vertex figure. $$\{p,q\}$$ is thus the Schläfli type of all such polyhedra although it is the Schläfli symbol for only one of them. More precisely the Schläfli type of a polytope is the Schläfli symbol of its universal cover. In ordinary Euclidean space the Schläfli symbol and Schläfli type are always the same. That is if a polytope has a Schläfli type that is also its Schläfli symbol.