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Honeycomb is also sometimes used for higher dimensional tessellations as well. For clarity,
George Olshevsky advocates limiting the term honeycomb to 3-space tessellations and
Tetrahedral-octahedral honeycomb
cubic honeycomb
expanding a systematic terminology for higher dimensions: tetracomb as tessellations of 4-
space, and pentacomb as tessellations of 5-space, and so on.
Contents
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• 1 General characteristics
• 2 Classification
o 2.1 Uniform honeycombs
o 2.2 Space-filling polyhedra
o 2.3 Non-convex honeycombs
o 2.4 Hyperbolic honeycombs
• 3 Duality of honeycombs
• 4 References
• 5 See also
• 6 External links
General characteristics
It is possible to fill the plane with polygons which do not meet at their corners, for example
using rectangles, as in a brick wall pattern:
This is not a proper tiling because corners lie part way along the edge of a neighbouring
polygon. Similarly, in a proper honeycomb, there must be no edges or vertices lying part
way along the face of a neighbouring cell.
Classification
There are infinitely many honeycombs, which have never been fully classified. The more
regular ones have attracted the most interest, while a rich and varied assortment of others
continue to be discovered.
The simplest honeycombs to build are formed from stacked layers or slabs of prisms based
on some tessellation of the plane. In particular, for every parallelepiped, copies can fill
space, with the cubic honeycomb being special because it is the only regular honeycomb in
ordinary (Euclidean) space.
Uniform honeycombs
Space-filling polyhedra
A honeycomb having all cells identical within its symmetries is said to be cell-transitive or
isochoric. A cell is said to be a space-filling polyhedron. Well-known examples include:
• The regular packing of cubes.
• The uniform packing of truncated octahedra.
• The rhombic dodecahedral honeycomb.
• The rhombo-hexagonal dodecahedron honeycomb.
• A packing of any cuboid, rhombic hexahedron or parallelepiped.
Weaire-Phelan
structure
rhombo-hexagonal (With two types of
Truncated octahedra Rhombic dodecahedra dodecahedra cells)
Non-convex honeycombs
Hyperbolic honeycombs
Hyperbolic space behaves rather differently from ordinary Euclidean space, with cells
fitting together according to rather different rules. Several hyperbolic honeycombs are
already documented.
Duality of honeycombs
For every honeycomb there is a dual honeycomb, which may be obtained by exchanging:
These are just the rules for dualising four-dimensional polychora, except that the usual
finite method of reciprocation about a concentric hypersphere can run into problems.
References
• Grünbaum & Shepherd, Uniform tilings of 3-space.
• Coxeter; Regular polytopes.
• Williams, R.; The geometrical foundation of natural structure.
• Critchlow, K.; Order in space.
• Pearce, P.; Structure in nature is a strategy for design.
• Inchbald, G.: The Archimedean Honeycomb duals, The Mathematical Gazette 81,
July 1997, p.p. 213-219.