Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Vertex figure
Summary
In geometry, a vertex figure, broadly speaking, is the figure exposed when a corner of a polyhedron or polytope is sliced off.
Take some corner or vertex of a polyhedron. Mark a point somewhere along each connected edge. Draw lines across the connected faces, joining adjacent points around the face. When done, these lines form a complete circuit, i.e. a polygon, around the vertex. This polygon is the vertex figure.
More precise formal definitions can vary quite widely, according to circumstance. For example Coxeter (e.g. 1948, 1954) varies his definition as convenient for the current area of discussion. Most of the following definitions of a vertex figure apply equally well to infinite tilings or, by extension, to space-filling tessellation with polytope cells and other higher-dimensional polytopes.
Make a slice through the corner of the polyhedron, cutting through all the edges connected to the vertex. The cut surface is the vertex figure. This is perhaps the most common approach, and the most easily understood. Different authors make the slice in different places. Wenninger (2003) cuts each edge a unit distance from the vertex, as does Coxeter (1948). For uniform polyhedra the Dorman Luke construction cuts each connected edge at its midpoint. Other authors make the cut through the vertex at the other end of each edge.
For an irregular polyhedron, cutting all edges incident to a given vertex at equal distances from the vertex may produce a figure that does not lie in a plane. A more general approach, valid for arbitrary convex polyhedra, is to make the cut along any plane which separates the given vertex from all the other vertices, but is otherwise arbitrary. This construction determines the combinatorial structure of the vertex figure, similar to a set of connected vertices (see below), but not its precise geometry; it may be generalized to convex polytopes in any dimension. However, for non-convex polyhedra, there may not exist a plane near the vertex that cuts all of the faces incident to the vertex.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related courses (16)
MATH-451: Numerical approximation of PDEs
The course is about the derivation, theoretical analysis and implementation of the finite element method for the numerical approximation of partial differential equations in one and two space dimens
PHYS-432: Quantum field theory II
The goal of the course is to introduce relativistic quantum field theory as the conceptual and mathematical framework describing fundamental interactions such as Quantum Electrodynamics.
MATH-410: Riemann surfaces
This course is an introduction to the theory of Riemann surfaces. Riemann surfaces naturally appear is mathematics in many different ways: as a result of analytic continuation, as quotients of complex
Related lectures (35)
Local to Global Mapping in Finite Element Analysis
Discusses mapping local to global coordinates in finite element analysis and the importance of vertex numbering.
AdS/CFT Correspondence
Explores the AdS/CFT correspondence in various dimensions and its implications for string theory and quantum gravity.
Graph Sketching: Connected Components
Covers graph sketching and connected components in streaming models.
Related publications (67)
Quasi-categories vs. Segal spaces: Cartesian edition
We prove that four different ways of defining Cartesian fibrations and the Cartesian model structure are all Quillen equivalent: 1.On marked simplicial sets (due to Lurie [31]), 2.On bisimplicial spaces (due to deBrito [12]), 3.On bisimplicial sets, 4.On m ...
2021Related people (10)
Related concepts (34)
Honeycomb (geometry)
In geometry, a honeycomb is a space filling or close packing of polyhedral or higher-dimensional cells, so that there are no gaps. It is an example of the more general mathematical tiling or tessellation in any number of dimensions. Its dimension can be clarified as n-honeycomb for a honeycomb of n-dimensional space. Honeycombs are usually constructed in ordinary Euclidean ("flat") space. They may also be constructed in non-Euclidean spaces, such as hyperbolic honeycombs.
Pentagram
A pentagram (sometimes known as a pentalpha, pentangle, or star pentagon) is a regular five-pointed star polygon, formed from the diagonal line segments of a convex (or simple, or non-self-intersecting) regular pentagon. Drawing a circle around the five points creates a similar symbol referred to as the pentacle, which is used widely by Wiccans and in paganism, or as a sign of life and connections. The word "pentagram" refers only to the five-pointed star, not the surrounding circle of a pentacle.
Uniform polytope
In geometry, a uniform polytope of dimension three or higher is a vertex-transitive polytope bounded by uniform facets. The uniform polytopes in two dimensions are the regular polygons (the definition is different in 2 dimensions to exclude vertex-transitive even-sided polygons that alternate two different lengths of edges). This is a generalization of the older category of semiregular polytopes, but also includes the regular polytopes. Further, star regular faces and vertex figures (star polygons) are allowed, which greatly expand the possible solutions.