Steven Dutch, Professor Emeritus, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
These are Schlegel Nets; that is, one face (usually the one with the most edges) hasbeen selected as a base and the polyhedron flattened into a plane within the enclosingpolygon. To help with identifying faces, they are color-coded as follows:
Also, we are only concerned with topologically distinct polyhedra, that is, differing in number or type of faces and vertices. Thus, a triangular prism and a tetrahedron with one vertex truncated are topologically equivalent 5-hedra, a cube and rhombohedron are topologically equivalent 6-hedra, and so on. Some polyhedra, for example those with two pentagon faces, are inherently ambiguous, because the net will be different depending on which pentagon is considered the base. Those cases can be sorted out by drawing auxiliary diagrams with both pentagons folded flat and regarded as the base. In a number of cases, equivalent polyhedra are shown, for the benefit of readers who may think they have discovered an unlisted case.
The original manual listing of 8-hedra was compared with the output from the graph-listing program plantri.exe, and about 15 errors were found, either omissions or duplications. These have been corrected in the present listing. A program to draw nets given the plantri.exe face adjacencies was developed and each net was compared to the output. A few more duplications and omissions were found and corrected. Also, each net is shown in its topological variants. For example, the polyhedra 3333-4444 can have any one of the four quadrilateral faces as a base. Thus there can be up to four views of each polyhedron. There may be fewer if the polyhedron is symmetrical.
The polyhedra are numbered, and the numbers refer to a listing generated by plantri.exe. Plantri.exe is principally concerned with enumerating graphs, not polyhedra. Thus the way it generates successive graphs has little to do with the visual appearance of the graphs. The polyhedra shown here are sorted by topological similarities. Thus the numbers are frequently (usually) not sequential.
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Created 17 June 2014, Last Update 11 June 2020