Uniform tilings . . . Uniform tetracombs
Welcome to my website on uniform Euclidean 3-dimensional honeycombs. The style of this list and the names were inspired by Jonathan Bowers' list of uniform polychora, which you should really check out.
Update: Clarified that the non-coincidic requirement only applies to faces and higher. After all, every pair of edges shares the same ridge (the nullitope).
Update: The formal definition of uniform honeycomb used on this page has been updated to exclude vertex-dense figures. This was always part of my intuitive definition, but I missed it in my formalization until now. The list itself has not changed.
For the purposes of this webpage, a honeycomb is a tessellation of polyhedra (cells) in flat 3-dimensional space. The polyhedra can overlap, and their faces can intersect, as long as every cell touches exactly one other cell at each of its faces. Cells can be infinite tilings of the plane as well as finite polyhedra, and faces can be apeirogons (an endless row of line segments) as well as polygons.
Formally, a honeycomb is an abstract polytope of rank 4 embedded in 3-space. In particular, this means that:
In order to be a proper honeycomb, I also require that:
Each vertex is identified with a point in Euclidean 3-space, satisfying the following conditions:
In order for a honeycomb to be uniform (by my definition), it must have the additional properties:
Finally, in order for a honeycomb to not be placed in Category B and excluded in the main count, it must not be a subdivision: it cannot have two adjacent cells that are circumscribable in the same sphere or embeddable in the same plane. Equivalently, the vertex figure cannot have two coplanar faces meeting at an edge.
Category A: Polygon-apeirogon duoprisms - This is the infinite set of duoprisms between an apeirogon and any regular polygon (not counting an apeirogon). Each of them looks like a column of n-gonal prisms, with apeirogonal prisms on the sides.
Category B: Subdivisions - These are the honeycombs with multiple apeiratic cells in the same plane. Their vertex figures have coplanar faces. For each honeycomb in this category, there is an analogous honeycomb somewhere else where each stack of apeiratic cells is replaced by a single apeiratic cell.
Category 1: Primaries - The two members of the chon regiment with full (o4o3o4x) or half (o3o4x *b3o) symmetry, as well as the fully symmetric members of the octet regiment.
Category 2: Truncates - These are the truncates of the honeycombs from category 1 that have uniform vertex figures.
Category 3: Rich regiment - Rich is the rectified cubic honeycomb. Its regiment contains 49 members, whose vertex figures are facetings of square prisms.
Category 4: Sphenoverts - These are the honeycombs with wedge-shaped vertex figures and their regiments.
Category 5: Greater truncates - These are the great rhombates and great prismates and their kin. The vertex figures are various types of irregular tetrahedra.
Category 6: Prismatorhombates - These are the prismatorhombates (runcicantellates) and others with similar vertex figures, and their regiments. Their vertex figures are trapezoid pyramids.
Category 7: Triangular podiumverts - These are the honeycombs with triangular podia or antipodia as their vertex figures, and their regiments.
Category 8: Gacoca regiment - The gacoca regiment has 66 members whose vertex figures are facetings of a square podium (frustum).
Category 9: Skewverts - These are the honeycombs with skewed wedges as vertex figures, and their regiments.
Category 10: Ditetrahedronaries - These are the members of the octet regiment with cyclotettic symmetry. They have tetrahedrally symmetric vertex figures.
Category 11: Stut Cadoca regiment - This category contains the 79 members of the stut cadoca regiment.
Category 12: Prismatic honeycombs and their regiments
Category 13: Prisms
Category 14: Other slabs
Category 15: Gyrates and elongates
Category 16: Miscellaneous blends - This category contains blended honeycombs that don't fit into other categories and form small regiments. These are the 3D analogs of hsaka's "Complex Uniform Tessellations on the Euclid Plane".
Category 17: Skivcadach - Quiprich blends - This is a kaleidoscopic non-Wythoffian regiment formed by blending skivcadach from category 9 with quiprich from category 6. It contains over 200 members.
Category 18: Miscellaneous - This category contains only one member so far: apsirsh, the only known uniform honeycomb containing cells with icosahedral symmetry.
Here is a spreadsheet of all known uniform honeycombs. Some of the Bowers-style acronyms are official, but most are unofficial.
Here are other people's pages on similar polytopes.
Uniform Polychora and Other Four Dimensional Shapes by Jonathan Bowers
List of hyperbolic honeycombs by lllllllllwith10ls
List of uniform honeycombs on hi.gher.space, the thread where most uniform honeycomb discoveries were announced ("polychoronlover" is me)
Username5243's honeycombs spreadsheet - Username5243 helped coin most of the names for these honeycombs and set up the categorization.
Main polytope page - Apeiratizations - Elementary deltahedra
The vertex figure images were created using Miratope, a polytope rendering software by the Miratope team.