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Concept
Complex polytope
Summary
In geometry, a complex polytope is a generalization of a polytope in real space to an analogous structure in a complex Hilbert space, where each real dimension is accompanied by an imaginary one.
A complex polytope may be understood as a collection of complex points, lines, planes, and so on, where every point is the junction of multiple lines, every line of multiple planes, and so on.
Precise definitions exist only for the regular complex polytopes, which are configurations. The regular complex polytopes have been completely characterized, and can be described using a symbolic notation developed by Coxeter.
Some complex polytopes which are not fully regular have also been described.
The complex line has one dimension with real coordinates and another with imaginary coordinates. Applying real coordinates to both dimensions is said to give it two dimensions over the real numbers. A real plane, with the imaginary axis labelled as such, is called an Argand diagram. Because of this it is sometimes called the complex plane. Complex 2-space (also sometimes called the complex plane) is thus a four-dimensional space over the reals, and so on in higher dimensions.
A complex n-polytope in complex n-space is the analogue of a real n-polytope in real n-space.
There is no natural complex analogue of the ordering of points on a real line (or of the associated combinatorial properties). Because of this a complex polytope cannot be seen as a contiguous surface and it does not bound an interior in the way that a real polytope does.
In the case of regular polytopes, a precise definition can be made by using the notion of symmetry. For any regular polytope the symmetry group (here a complex reflection group, called a Shephard group) acts transitively on the flags, that is, on the nested sequences of a point contained in a line contained in a plane and so on.
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