subgroups of regular polytopes that preserve a given face

52 Views Asked by At

Say I have a regular polytope (e.g. it is vertex and face transitive). Given a face F, is it true that there are symmetry operations taking every vertex of F to every other that also send F to its self? I know that every face of a regular polytope is a regular polytope, so this seems like a logical assertion.

To give an example of where this holds, for a face of a cube there is a cyclic subgroup that permutes all vertices of any of given square face, whilst mapping that face to its self (e.g. the rotations about the normal of that face)

1

There are 1 best solutions below

2
On

Yes. The more general definition of a regular polytope is that its symmetry group acts transitively on its flags. A flag is a maximal chain of incident faces, e.g. for a polyhedron, a vertex $v$, an edge $e$ containing $v$, and a face containing $e$.

So, with a regular polyhedron, you can pick a vertex $v$, a face $f$, and an edge $e$ of $f$ containing $v$, and map it to the same face $f$, any vertex $w$ of $f$, and either of the edges $e'$ of $f$ containing $w$.