In four-dimensional geometry, the 24-cell is a convex regular 4-polytope, a four-dimensional analogue of a Platonic solid. It is named for the 24 octahedra that form its boundary.
It is also called C24, or the icositetrachoron, octaplex (short for "octahedral complex"), icosatetrahedroid, octacube, hyper-diamond or polyoctahedron, being constructed of octahedral cells.
Geometric description The 24-cell is a convex four-dimensional polytope boundary, an analogy of nearly the cuboctahedron and its dual the rhombic dodecahedron in four dimensions. It is composed of 24 octahedral cells with six meeting at each vertex, and three at each edge. Together, it has 96 triangular faces, 96 edges, and 24 vertices. Like other four-dimensional regular polytope, 5-cell, the 24-cell is self-dual. The 24-cell and the tesseract are the only convex regular 4-polytopes in which the edge length equals the radius. Its geometry is summarized by its Schläfli symbol, , which indicates that its faces are regular 3-gons (triangles), its cells are octahedra (polyhedra with 3-sided faces, 4 of which meet at each vertex), and the vertex figure is a cube (a polyhedron with 4-sided faces, 3 of which meet at each vertex).
The 24-cell incorporates the geometries of every convex regular polytope in the first four dimensions, except the 5-cell, those with a 5 in their Schlӓfli symbol, and the regular polygons with 7 or more sides. In other words, the 24-cell contains all of the regular polytopes made of triangles and squares that exist in four dimensions except the regular 5-cell, but none of the pentagonal polytopes. The geometric relationships among all of these regular polytopes can be observed in a single 24-cell or the 24-cell honeycomb.
The 24-cell is the fourth in the sequence of six convex regular 4-polytopes (in order of size and complexity). The convex regular 4-polytopes can be ordered by size as a measure of 4-dimensional content (hypervolume) for the same radius. This is their proper order of enumeration, the order in which they nest inside each other as compounds. Each greater polytope in the sequence is rounder than its predecessor, enclosing more content within the same radius. The 4-simplex (5-cell) is the limit smallest case, and the 120-cell is the largest. Complexity (as measured by comparing configuration matrices or simply the number of vertices) follows the same ordering. This provides an alternative numerical naming scheme for regular polytopes in which the 24-cell is the 24-point 4-polytope: fourth in the ascending sequence that runs from 5-point 4-polytope to 600-point 4-polytope. It can be deconstructed into 3 overlapping instances of its predecessor the tesseract (8-cell), as the 8-cell can be deconstructed into 2 instances of its predecessor the 16-cell. The reverse procedure to construct each of these from an instance of its predecessor preserves the radius of the predecessor, but generally produces a successor with a smaller edge length.
The 24-cell is the convex hull of its vertices which can be described as the 24 coordinate permutations of:Those coordinates can be constructed as the 24-cell , rectifying the 16-cell with the 8 vertices that are permutations of . The vertex figure of a 16-cell is the octahedron; thus, cutting the vertices of the 16-cell at the midpoint of its incident edges produces 8 octahedral cells. This process also rectifies the tetrahedral cells of the 16-cell which become 16 octahedra, giving the 24-cell 24 octahedral cells.
The 12 axes and 16 hexagons of the 24-cell constitute a Reye configuration, which in the language of configurations is written as 124163 to indicate that each axis belongs to 4 hexagons, and each hexagon contains 3 axes.
This configuration matrix represents the 24-cell. The rows and columns correspond to vertices, edges, faces, and cells. The diagonal numbers say how many of each element occur in the whole 24-cell. The non-diagonal numbers say how many of the column's element occur in or at the row's element.
Root systems
The 24 root vectors of the D4 root system of the simple Lie group SO(8) form the vertices of a 24-cell. The vertices can be seen in 3 hyperplanes, with the 6 vertices of an octahedron cell on each of the outer hyperplanes and 12 vertices of a cuboctahedron on a central hyperplane. These vertices, combined with the 8 vertices of the 16-cell, represent the 32 root vectors of the B4 and C4 simple Lie groups.
The 48 vertices (or strictly speaking their radius vectors) of the union of the 24-cell and its dual form the root system of type F4. The 24 vertices of the original 24-cell form a root system of type D4; its size has the ratio :1. This is likewise true for the 24 vertices of its dual. The full symmetry group of the 24-cell is the Weyl group of F4, which is generated by reflections through the hyperplanes orthogonal to the F4 roots. This is a solvable group of order 1152. The rotational symmetry group of the 24-cell is of order 576.
Quaternionic interpretation
When interpreted as the quaternions, the F4 root lattice (which is the integral span of the vertices of the 24-cell) is closed under multiplication and is therefore a ring. This is the ring of Hurwitz integral quaternions. The vertices of the 24-cell form the group of units (i.e. the group of invertible elements) in the Hurwitz quaternion ring (this group is also known as the binary tetrahedral group). The vertices of the 24-cell are precisely the 24 Hurwitz quaternions with norm squared 1, and the vertices of the dual 24-cell are those with norm squared 2. The D4 root lattice is the dual of the F4 and is given by the subring of Hurwitz quaternions with even norm squared.
Viewed as the 24 unit Hurwitz quaternions, the unit radius coordinates of the 24-cell represent (in antipodal pairs) the 12 rotations of a regular tetrahedron.
Vertices of other convex regular 4-polytopes also form multiplicative groups of quaternions, but few of them generate a root lattice.
Voronoi cells and tessellation
The Voronoi cells of the D4 root lattice are regular 24-cells. The corresponding Voronoi tessellation gives the tessellation of four-dimensional Euclidean space by regular 24-cells, the 24-cell honeycomb. As a polytope that can tile by translation, the 24-cell is an example of a parallelotope, the simplest one that is not also a zonotope. The Schläfli symbol for this tessellation is . It is one of only three regular tessellations of . The 24-cells are centered at the D4 lattice points (Hurwitz quaternions with even norm squared) while the vertices are at the F4 lattice points with odd norm squared. Each 24-cell of this tessellation has 24 neighbors. With each of these it shares an octahedron. It also has 24 other neighbors with which it shares only a single vertex. Eight 24-cells meet at any given vertex in this tessellation.
The dual tessellation of the 24-cell honeycomb {3,4,3,3} is the 16-cell honeycomb {3,3,4,3}. The third regular tessellation of four dimensional space is the tesseractic honeycomb {4,3,3,4}, whose vertices can be described by 4-integer Cartesian coordinates. The congruent relationships among these three tessellations can be helpful in visualizing the 24-cell, in particular the radial equilateral symmetry which it shares with the tesseract.
Rotations The regular convex 4-polytopes are an expression of their underlying symmetry which is known as SO(4), the group of rotations about a fixed point in 4-dimensional Euclidean space.Rotations in 4-dimensional Euclidean space can be seen as the composition of two 2-dimensional rotations in completely orthogonal planes. Thus the general rotation in 4-space is a double rotation. There are two important special cases: a simple rotation (in which one rotational angle is 0) and an isoclinic rotation (similar but not identical to two simple rotations through the same angle).
In the 24-cell, there is a simple rotation which will take any vertex directly to any other vertex, also moving most of the other vertices but leaving at least 2 and at most 6 other vertices fixed (the vertices that the fixed central plane intersects). The vertex moves along a great circle in the invariant plane of rotation between adjacent vertices of a great hexagon, a great square or a great digon, and the completely orthogonal fixed plane is a digon, a square or a hexagon, respectively. Double rotations come in two chiral forms: left and right rotations. In a double rotation each vertex moves in a spiral along two orthogonal great circles at once. Either the path is right-hand threaded (like most screws and bolts), moving along the circles in the "same" directions, or it is left-hand threaded (like a reverse-threaded bolt), moving along the circles in what we conventionally say are "opposite" directions (according to the right hand rule by which we conventionally say which way is "up" on each of the 4 coordinate axes). In double rotations of the 24-cell that take vertices to vertices, one invariant plane of rotation contains either a great hexagon, a great square, or only an axis (two vertices, a great digon). The completely orthogonal invariant plane of rotation will necessarily contain a great digon, a great square, or a great hexagon, respectively. The selection of an invariant plane of rotation, a rotational direction and angle through which to rotate it, and a rotational direction and angle through which to rotate its completely orthogonal plane, completely determines the nature of the rotational displacement. In the 24-cell, there are several noteworthy kinds of double rotation permitted by these parameters. When the angles of rotation in the two completely orthogonal invariant planes are exactly the same, a remarkably symmetric transformation occurs: all the great circle planes Clifford parallel to the pair of invariant planes become pairs of invariant planes of rotation themselves, through that same angle, and the 4-polytope rotates isoclinically in many directions at once. Each vertex moves an equal distance in four orthogonal directions at the same time. In the 24-cell any isoclinic rotation through 60 degrees in a hexagonal plane takes each vertex to a vertex two edge lengths away, rotates all 16 hexagons by 60 degrees, and takes every great circle polygon (square, hexagon or triangle) to a Clifford parallel great circle polygon of the same kind 120 degrees away. An isoclinic rotation is also called a Clifford displacement, after its discoverer.
The 24-cell in the double rotation animation appears to turn itself inside out. It appears to, because it actually does, reversing the chirality of the whole 4-polytope just the way your bathroom mirror reverses the chirality of your image by a 180 degree reflection. Each 360 degree isoclinic rotation is as if the 24-cell surface had been stripped off like a glove and turned inside out, making a right-hand glove into a left-hand glove (or vice versa).
Characteristic orthoscheme Characteristics of the 24-celledgearcdihedral𝒍60°120°𝟀45°45°𝝉30°60°𝟁30°60°45°90°30°90°30°90° Every regular 4-polytope has its characteristic 4-orthoscheme, an irregular 5-cell. The characteristic 5-cell of the regular 24-cell is represented by the Coxeter-Dynkin diagram , which can be read as a list of the dihedral angles between its mirror facets. It is an irregular tetrahedral pyramid based on the characteristic tetrahedron of the regular octahedron. The regular 24-cell is subdivided by its symmetry hyperplanes into 1152 instances of its characteristic 5-cell that all meet at its center.