In geometry, an enneahedron (or nonahedron) is a polyhedron with nine faces. There are 2606 types of convex enneahedra, each having a different pattern of vertex, edge, and face connections.[1] None of them are regular.
Examples
Octagonal pyramid: a pyramid with eight isosceles triangular faces around a regular octagonal base.[2]
The dual of a triaugmented triangular prism, realized with three non-adjacent squares and six irregular pentagonal faces.[5][6] It is an order-5 associahedron, a polyhedron whose vertices represent the 14 triangulations of a regular hexagon.[5]
The Herschel enneahedron. All of the faces are quadrilaterals. It is the simplest polyhedron without a Hamiltonian cycle,[7] the only convex enneahedron in which all faces have the same number of edges,[8] and one of only three bipartite convex enneahedra[9].
Slicing a rhombic dodecahedron in half through the long diagonals of four of its faces results in a self-dual enneahedron, the square diminished trapezohedron, with one large square face, four rhombus faces, and four isosceles triangle faces. Like the rhombic dodecahedron itself, this shape can be used to tessellate three-dimensional space.[11] An elongated form of this shape that still tiles space can be seen atop the rear side towers of the 12th-century Romanesque Basilica of Our Lady (Maastricht). The towers themselves, with their four pentagonal sides, four roof facets, and square base, form another space-filling enneahedron.
More generally, Goldberg (1982) found at least 40 topologically distinct space-filling enneahedra.[12]
Topologically distinct enneahedra
There are 2606 topologically distinct convex enneahedra, excluding mirror images. These can be divided into subsets of 8, 74, 296, 633, 768, 558, 219, 50, with 7 to 14 vertices, respectively.[13] A table of these numbers, together with a detailed description of the nine-vertex enneahedra, was first published in the 1870s by Thomas Kirkman.[14]
^By the handshaking lemma, a face-regular polyhedron with an odd number of faces must have faces with an even number of edges, which for convex polyhedra can only be quadrilaterals. An enumeration of the dual graphs of quadrilateral-faced polyhedra is given by Broersma, H. J.; Duijvestijn, A. J. W.; Göbel, F. (1993), "Generating all 3-connected 4-regular planar graphs from the octahedron graph", Journal of Graph Theory, 17 (5): 613–620, doi:10.1002/jgt.3190170508, MR1242180. Table 1, p. 619, shows that there is only one with nine faces.
^Dillencourt, Michael B. (1996), "Polyhedra of small order and their Hamiltonian properties", Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 66 (1): 87–122, doi:10.1006/jctb.1996.0008, MR1368518; see Table IX, p. 102.
^Hosoya, Haruo; Nagashima, Umpei; Hyugaji, Sachiko (1994), "Topological twin graphs. Smallest pair of isospectral polyhedral graphs with eight vertices", Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 34 (2): 428–431, doi:10.1021/ci00018a033.
^Critchlow, Keith (1970), Order in space: a design source book, Viking Press, p. 54.
^Biggs, N.L. (1981), "T.P. Kirkman, mathematician", The Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, 13 (2): 97–120, doi:10.1112/blms/13.2.97, MR0608093.