The 7-cubic honeycomb or hepteractic honeycomb is the only regular space-filling

tessellation A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called ''tiles'', with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellation can be generalized to higher dimensions and a variety of ge ...

(or

honeycomb A honeycomb is a mass of hexagonal prismatic wax cells built by honey bees in their nests to contain their larvae and stores of honey and pollen. Beekeepers may remove the entire honeycomb to harvest honey. Honey bees consume about of honey t ...

) in Euclidean 7-space. It is analogous to the

square tiling In geometry, the square tiling, square tessellation or square grid is a regular tiling of the Euclidean plane. It has Schläfli symbol of meaning it has 4 squares around every vertex. Conway called it a quadrille. The internal angle of th ...

of the plane and to the

cubic honeycomb The cubic honeycomb or cubic cellulation is the only proper regular space-filling tessellation (or honeycomb) in Euclidean 3-space made up of cubic cells. It has 4 cubes around every edge, and 8 cubes around each vertex. Its vertex figure is a ...

of 3-space. There are many different

Wythoff construction In geometry, a Wythoff construction, named after mathematician Willem Abraham Wythoff, is a method for constructing a uniform polyhedron or plane tiling. It is often referred to as Wythoff's kaleidoscopic construction. Construction process ...

s of this honeycomb. The most symmetric form is

regular The term regular can mean normal or in accordance with rules. It may refer to: People * Moses Regular (born 1971), America football player Arts, entertainment, and media Music * "Regular" (Badfinger song) * Regular tunings of stringed instrum ...

, with

Schläfli symbol In geometry, the Schläfli symbol is a notation of the form \ that defines regular polytopes and tessellations. The Schläfli symbol is named after the 19th-century Swiss mathematician Ludwig Schläfli, who generalized Euclidean geometry to mor ...

. Another form has two alternating

7-cube In geometry, a 7-cube is a seven-dimensional hypercube with 128 vertices, 448 edges, 672 square faces, 560 cubic cells, 280 tesseract 4-faces, 84 penteract 5-faces, and 14 hexeract 6-faces. It can be named by its Schläfli symbol , being ...

facets (like a checkerboard) with Schläfli symbol . The lowest symmetry Wythoff construction has 128 types of facets around each vertex and a prismatic product Schläfli symbol ⁷.

Related honeycombs

The ,3⁵,4 , Coxeter group generates 255 permutations of uniform tessellations, 135 with unique symmetry and 134 with unique geometry. The expanded 7-cubic honeycomb is geometrically identical to the 7-cubic honeycomb. The ''7-cubic honeycomb'' can be alternated into the 7-demicubic honeycomb, replacing the 7-cubes with

7-demicube In geometry, a demihepteract or 7-demicube is a uniform 7-polytope, constructed from the 7-hypercube (hepteract) with alternated vertices removed. It is part of a dimensionally infinite family of uniform polytopes called demihypercubes. E. L. El ...

s, and the alternated gaps are filled by

7-orthoplex In geometry, a 7-orthoplex, or 7-cross polytope, is a regular 7-polytope with 14 vertices, 84 edges, 280 triangle faces, 560 tetrahedron cells, 672 5-cells ''4-faces'', 448 ''5-faces'', and 128 ''6-faces''. It has two constructed forms, the fir ...

facets.

Quadritruncated 7-cubic honeycomb

A quadritruncated 7-cubic honeycomb, , contains all tritruncated 7-orthoplex facets and is the

Voronoi tessellation Voronoi or Voronoy is a Slavic masculine surname; its feminine counterpart is Voronaya. It may refer to *Georgy Voronoy (1868–1908), Russian and Ukrainian mathematician **Voronoi diagram ** Weighted Voronoi diagram ** Voronoi deformation density * ...

of the D₇^* lattice. Facets can be identically colored from a doubled

_7

×2, 4,3⁵,4 symmetry, alternately colored from

_7

, ,3⁵,4symmetry, three colors from

_7

, ,3⁴,3^1,1symmetry, and 4 colors from

_7

, ^1,1,3³,3^1,1symmetry.

References

* Coxeter, H.S.M. ''

Regular Polytopes In mathematics, a regular polytope is a polytope whose symmetry group acts transitively on its flags, thus giving it the highest degree of symmetry. All its elements or -faces (for all , where is the dimension of the polytope) — cells, ...

'', (3rd edition, 1973), Dover edition, p. 296, Table II: Regular honeycombs * Kaleidoscopes: Selected Writings of

H. S. M. Coxeter Harold Scott MacDonald "Donald" Coxeter, (9 February 1907 – 31 March 2003) was a British and later also Canadian geometer. He is regarded as one of the greatest geometers of the 20th century. Biography Coxeter was born in Kensington t ...

, edited by F. Arthur Sherk, Peter McMullen, Anthony C. Thompson, Asia Ivic Weiss, Wiley-Interscience Publication, 1995,

** (Paper 24) H.S.M. Coxeter, ''Regular and Semi-Regular Polytopes III'', ath. Zeit. 200 (1988) 3-45 {{Honeycombs Honeycombs (geometry) 8-polytopes Regular tessellations

Related honeycombs

Quadritruncated 7-cubic honeycomb

See also

References