A polyhedron can have one of 17 types of symmetry. These are the
collections of ways in which a polyhedron can be repositioned without
being able to distinguish the new position from the original position.
Some of the symmetry types have an infinite number of members. The
n in the symmetry type is replaced with an integer to give the
particular symmetry.
The images and models have been produced with a polyhedral kaleidoscope
program
poly_kscope.
An asymetric arrow is repeated in the given symmetry pattern to produce
each model. The number of arrows is then equal to the number of
symmetries (possible congruent repositionings) of the model.
The models can be
viewed with JavaView
which allows them to be rotated and seen from different angles.
This is a new feature on the site and is activated with JavaScript code
which may yet require some tuning to work on different browsers.
