Talk:List of polygons, polyhedra and polytopes

This article was nominated for deletion on 25 May 2011. The result of the discussion was no consensus.

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Polyhedra

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Deletion proposal

I found this article under Category:polygons. It doesn't seem useful, merely an alphabetical listing of article names. The categories themselves serve this porpose much better. I see no value in keeping this article, and no suggestion how it might be more useful. Tom Ruen (talk) 20:05, 23 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

An annotated list would be better, and more useful than this, so it can be made useful.

Confusion

What exactly is the purpose of this list. To list ALL polytopes in all dimensions? It would be better for this list to contain only links to pages listing specific classes of polytopes (a link to a list of uniform polyhedra, a link to a list of dual uniform polyhedra ,a link to a list of uniform 4-polytopes (polychora), a link to a list of uniform 5-polytopes, a list to regular star polytopes in dimension 2, 3, 4, etc. In this way it could give a good overview over the existing specific classes of polytopes. But in my opinion in the current condition it seems quite useless to me as it is too unstructured. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 17:33, 3 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, useless. Category:polytopes subgroups them nicely by dimension. Template:Polytopes lists regular ones by family and dimension. Tom Ruen (talk) 19:06, 3 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How are we going to list every single polytope that is possible? Thats infinity, not even counting polygons and polyhedra. I recommend deletion of this page (I realize an afd just took place, but I'm just commenting).Curb Chain (talk) 23:14, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Notability limits the list to a finite number of actual articles. I think the only value of "improving" the list now to be more updated is that someone interested in restructuring it will have a better sense of what needs to be organized. I hope its not another 5 years before this list is improved. It does seem ironic that its only been the editors interested in deletion that have expanded the contents! Tom Ruen (talk) 23:22, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Some people argue that this list is a useful navigational aid for polytope articles. Let me express that I do not share this view. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 23:32, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It would be a useful list if the list was sorted into some groupings based on dimension or other property, and had some brief prose explaining the common features of items in each group. A well written 'List of ...' article generally serves as a portal to a wide ranging topic - for example: List of pharmaceutical companies, List of tallest buildings and structures in the world, ... On the other hand, perhaps some of the same could be achieved with categorization. Astronaut (talk) 11:33, 6 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I also think the polytopes in this list should be grouped by dimension. If no one objects, I am going to add some headings, like Dimension 1, Dimension 2, Dimension 3 etc and arrange the polytopes in this list under the appropriate heading, maybe under subheadings like Uniform polyhedron and similar things. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 11:43, 6 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea, although I'd probably "start from scratch", taking from the categories rather than trying to filter all the groupings out this list. But there's a problem of losing some if there actually are useful articles actually missing from categories, SO possibly better to make a different article? Then you can sort that list, and see if there's anything here missing from the new one? Okay, that's what I'd do, but I'm not going to do it, so happy editting! :) Tom Ruen (talk) 19:52, 6 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What Astronaut said covers some of what I was trying to say; I think the grouping by dimension (for the articles where that makes sense) is as good an idea as any. I agree that it's ironic that the major work on this list is currently being done by people who wanted to delete it, but I'm glad the work is getting done.

I do note that there are many links about types of polyhedra in the "Families" subsection of the "2-dimensional" section -- presumably those links should be either moved or deleted (in the case of duplicates), but haven't been yet. Would it be useful for me to make a list of the apparent duplicates, or should I just "be bold" and delete them, to narrow it down to links that need to be moved? Hrttu523 (talk) 16:19, 9 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Move the page

Should this page perhaps be moved to something like Outline of polytopes (see WP:OUTLINE), since this is more than a pure list of polytopes? Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 06:29, 8 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps, but seems like it should be split with polygon, and polyhedron covering the forms below 4-polytopes. But then the forms above polyhedra are MOSTLY the uniform polytopes, and so the whole idea breaks down for me! Tom Ruen (talk) 23:50, 8 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

User:Toshio Yamaguchi's suggestion above, that this page should become "something like Outline of polytopes", makes good sense to me. We need to improve the page, mostly in its organisation, to help readers find information of interest. So it needs to survey the various kinds of polytope, by several classificatory principles: not least of which is utility — whether that be to architects, designers, mathematicians or students — let's not assume our audience is academics.

And I'd like to quote from User:Hrttu523's contributions to the AfD discussion of 2011:

What it needs (in my opinion) is to be shorter, with fewer entries for individual polygons and polyhedra, more emphasis on classes and types (such as Archimedean solid and Cross-polytope), and more polyhedron/polytope topics, such as Stellation and Wythoff construction.

Whether such reorganised information should comprise a stand-alone "outline of …" or "survey of …" article, or whether we should incorporate it in the Polytope article, I'm not much concerned about. But we do need that information in some kind of "ready reference" format, which the usual list article format doesn't support well enough. As an analogy, the musicians among you may have heard of Nicolas Slonimsky's celebrated "Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns", useful to professional and amateur musos alike. Well, even recreational geometers could use some similar help: how about a "Thesaurus of Polytopes"? yoyo (talk) 19:15, 8 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tilings and honeycombs

Should the uniform tilings and uniform honeycombs also be included in this list? Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 13:48, 9 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

They are less-well developed and not as centrally organized (or navagator boxes), so it couldn't hurt! Tom Ruen (talk) 20:22, 9 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The uniform honeycombs in 4 dimensions: is this list complete? If not could we add the missing ones? Unfortunately, I don't know, where to look them up. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 10:35, 10 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The list of 143 enumerated by George Olshevsky is complete. I've just focused on a few more common ones. I have an incomplete list, but all the pure reflectional ones at User:Tomruen/Convex_uniform_tetracomb. Klitzing lists them all in a good summary by family at [1], giving "inline ascii Coxeter diagrams", Bowers names, and Olshevsky indices. I hope to get back to that someday and get an article summary! Tom Ruen (talk)