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In geometry, a polyhedron (pl.: polyhedra or polyhedrons; from Greek πολύ (poly-) 'many' and ἕδρον (-hedron) 'base, seat') is a three-dimensional figure with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices. A convex polyhedron is a polyhedron that bounds a convex set.
One might characterise the Greek definition as follows: A regular polygon is a planar figure with all edges equal and all corners equal. A regular polyhedron is a solid (convex) figure with all faces being congruent regular polygons, the same number arranged all alike around each vertex.
A polyhedron is understood as a surface whose faces are polygons, a 4-polytope as a hypersurface whose facets are polyhedra, and so forth. The idea of constructing a higher polytope from those of lower dimension is also sometimes extended downwards in dimension, with an ( edge ) seen as a 1-polytope bounded by a point pair, and a point or ...
Regular polyhedron. Platonic solid: Tetrahedron, Cube, Octahedron, Dodecahedron, Icosahedron; Regular spherical polyhedron. Dihedron, Hosohedron; Kepler–Poinsot polyhedron (Regular star polyhedra) Small stellated dodecahedron, Great stellated dodecahedron, Great icosahedron, Great dodecahedron; Abstract regular polyhedra (Projective polyhedron)
A polygon inscribed in a circle, ellipse, or polygon (or a polyhedron inscribed in a sphere, ellipsoid, or polyhedron) has each vertex on the outer figure; if the outer figure is a polygon or polyhedron, there must be a vertex of the inscribed polygon or polyhedron on each side of the outer figure.
In elementary geometry, a face is a polygon [note 1] on the boundary of a polyhedron. [3] [4] Other names for a polygonal face include polyhedron side and Euclidean plane tile. For example, any of the six squares that bound a cube is a face of the cube. Sometimes "face" is also used to refer to the 2-dimensional features of a 4-polytope.
Coxeter, Longuet-Higgins & Miller (1954) define uniform polyhedra to be vertex-transitive polyhedra with regular faces. They define a polyhedron to be a finite set of polygons such that each side of a polygon is a side of just one other polygon, such that no non-empty proper subset of the polygons has the same property.
A simple polygon is the boundary of a region of the plane that is called a solid polygon. The interior of a solid polygon is its body, also known as a polygonal region or polygonal area. In contexts where one is concerned only with simple and solid polygons, a polygon may refer only to a simple polygon or to a solid polygon.