self-dual, self-petrie covers of regular polyhedra自对偶,self-petrie定期多面体的封面.pdfVIP

Symmetry 2012, 4, 208-218; doi:10.3390/sym4010208 OPEN ACCESS symmetry ISSN 2073-8994 /journal/symmetry Article Self-Dual, Self-Petrie Covers of Regular Polyhedra Gabe Cunningham Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115, USA; E-Mail: gabriel.cunningham@; Tel.: +1 617-406-9067 Received: 17 January 2012; in revised form: 21 February 2012 / Accepted: 23 February 2012 / Published: 27 February 2012 Abstract: The well-known duality and Petrie duality operations on maps have natural analogs for abstract polyhedra. Regular polyhedra that are invariant under both operations have a high degree of both “external” and “internal” symmetry. The mixing operation provides a natural way to build the minimal common cover of two polyhedra, and by mixing a regular polyhedron with its five other images under the duality operations, we are able to construct the minimal self-dual, self-Petrie cover of a regular polyhedron. Determining the full structure of these covers is challenging and generally requires that we use some of the standard algorithms in combinatorial group theory. However, we are able to develop criteria that sometimes yield the full structure without explicit calculations. Using these criteria and other interesting methods, we then calculate the size of the self-dual, self-Petrie covers of several polyhedra, including the regular convex polyhedra. Keywords: abstract polyhedron; convex polyhedron; duality; map operations; mixing; Petrie polygon;