Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
2:00pm - 3:00pm, in Science 2-064

Gabriel Cunningham

Northeastern University

Constructing regular abstract polyhedra with external symmetries

Abstract: Polyhedra are a combinatorial generalization of convex polyhedra and tessellations of surfaces. Of particular importance are the regular polyhedra, which have the highest degree of internal symmetry. In addition to these internal symmetries, which correspond to reflections and rotations, some regular polyhedra have external symmetries such as self-duality. This talk will introduce and motivate the subject of abstract polyhedra, and then we will see a group-theoretic method for constructing regular polyhedra with specified external symmetries.