Conway polyhedron notation

In geometry, Conway polyhedron notation, invented by John Horton Conway and promoted by George W. Hart, is used to describe polyhedra based on a seed polyhedron modified by various operations.

The seed polyhedra are the Platonic solids, represented by the first letter of their name (T,O,C,I,D); the prisms (Pn), antiprisms (An) and pyramids (Yn). Any convex polyhedron can serve as a seed, as long as the operations can be executed on it.

Conway extended the idea of using operators, like truncation defined by Kepler, to build related polyhedra of the same symmetry. His descriptive operators can generate all the Archimedean solids and Catalan solids from regular seeds. Applied in a series, these operators allow many higher order polyhedra to be generated.

In general, it is difficult to guess the resulting appearance of the composite of two or more operations from a given seed polyhedron. For instance ambo applied twice unexpectedly becomes the same as the expand operation: aa=e. There has been no general theory describing what polyhedra can be generated in by any set of operators. Instead all results have been discovered empirically.

Elements are given from the seed (v,e,f) to the new forms, assuming seed is a convex polyhedron: (a topological sphere, Euler characteristic = 2) An example image is given for each operation, based on a cubic seed. The basic operations are sufficient to generate the reflective uniform polyhedra and theirs duals. Some basic operations can be made as composites of others.

Special forms

The operators are applied like functions from right to left. For example, a cuboctahedron is an ambo cube, i.e. t(C) = aC, and a truncated cuboctahedron is t(a(C)) = t(aC) = taC.

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