Concept

Goursat tetrahedron

In geometry, a Goursat tetrahedron is a tetrahedral fundamental domain of a Wythoff construction. Each tetrahedral face represents a reflection hyperplane on 3-dimensional surfaces: the 3-sphere, Euclidean 3-space, and hyperbolic 3-space. Coxeter named them after Édouard Goursat who first looked into these domains. It is an extension of the theory of Schwarz triangles for Wythoff constructions on the sphere. A Goursat tetrahedron can be represented graphically by a tetrahedral graph, which is in a dual configuration of the fundamental domain tetrahedron. In the graph, each node represents a face (mirror) of the Goursat tetrahedron. Each edge is labeled by a rational value corresponding to the reflection order, being π/dihedral angle. A 4-node Coxeter-Dynkin diagram represents this tetrahedral graph with order-2 edges hidden. If many edges are order 2, the Coxeter group can be represented by a bracket notation. Existence requires each of the 3-node subgraphs of this graph, (p q r), (p u s), (q t u), and (r s t), must correspond to a Schwarz triangle. An extended symmetry of the Goursat tetrahedron is a semidirect product of the Coxeter group symmetry and the fundamental domain symmetry (the Goursat tetrahedron in these cases). Coxeter notation supports this symmetry as double-brackets like [Y[X]] means full Coxeter group symmetry [X], with Y as a symmetry of the Goursat tetrahedron. If Y is a pure reflective symmetry, the group will represent another Coxeter group of mirrors. If there is only one simple doubling symmetry, Y can be implicit like [[X]] with either reflectional or rotational symmetry depending on the context. The extended symmetry of each Goursat tetrahedron is also given below. The highest possible symmetry is that of the regular tetrahedron as [3,3], and this occurs in the prismatic point group [2,2,2] or [2[3,3]] and the paracompact hyperbolic group [3[3,3]]. See Tetrahedron#Isometries of irregular tetrahedra for 7 lower symmetry isometries of the tetrahedron.

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