Face (geometry)


In solid geometry, a face is a flat surface that forms part of the boundary of a solid object; a three-dimensional solid bounded exclusively by faces is a polyhedron.
In more technical treatments of the geometry of polyhedra and higher-dimensional polytopes, the term is also used to mean an element of any dimension of a more general polytope.

Polygonal face

In elementary geometry, a face is a polygon on the boundary of a polyhedron. Other names for a polygonal face include side of a polyhedron, and tile of a Euclidean plane tessellation.
For example, any of the six squares that bound a cube is a face of the cube. Sometimes "face" is also used to refer to the 2-dimensional features of a 4-polytope. With this meaning, the 4-dimensional tesseract has 24 square faces, each sharing two of 8 cubic cells.
PolyhedronStar polyhedronEuclidean tilingHyperbolic tiling4-polytope
cube|Small stellated dodecahedron|square tiling|Order-5 square tiling|tesseract|

The cube has 3 square faces per vertex.
The small stellated dodecahedron has 5 pentagrammic faces per vertex.
The square tiling in the Euclidean plane has 4 square faces per vertex.
The order-5 square tiling has 5 square faces per vertex.
The tesseract has 3 square faces per edge.

Number of polygonal faces of a polyhedron

Any convex polyhedron's surface has Euler characteristic
where V is the number of vertices, E is the number of edges, and F is the number of faces. This equation is known as Euler's polyhedron formula. Thus the number of faces is 2 more than the excess of the number of edges over the number of vertices. For example, a cube has 12 edges and 8 vertices, and hence 6 faces.

''k''-face

In higher-dimensional geometry, the faces of a polytope are features of all dimensions. A face of dimension k is called a k-face. For example, the polygonal faces of an ordinary polyhedron are 2-faces. In set theory, the set of faces of a polytope includes the polytope itself and the empty set, where the empty set is for consistency given a "dimension" of −1. For any n-polytope, −1 ≤ k ≤ n.
For example, with this meaning, the faces of a cube comprise the cube itself, its facets, edges, vertices, and the empty set. The following are the faces of a 4-dimensional polytope:
In some areas of mathematics, such as polyhedral combinatorics, a polytope is by definition convex. Formally, a face of a polytope P is the intersection of P with any closed halfspace whose boundary is disjoint from the interior of P. From this definition it follows that the set of faces of a polytope includes the polytope itself and the empty set.
In other areas of mathematics, such as the theories of abstract polytopes and star polytopes, the requirement for convexity is relaxed. Abstract theory still requires that the set of faces include the polytope itself and the empty set.

Cell or 3-face

A cell is a polyhedral element of a 4-dimensional polytope or 3-dimensional tessellation, or higher. Cells are facets for 4-polytopes and 3-honeycombs.
Examples:

Facet or (''n''-1)-face

In higher-dimensional geometry, the facets of a n-polytope are the -faces. A polytope is bounded by its facets.
For example:
In related terminology, the -faces of an n-polytope are called ridges. A ridge is seen as the boundary between exactly two facets of a polytope or honeycomb.
For example:
The -faces of an n-polytope are called peaks. A peak contains a rotational axis of facets and ridges in a regular polytope or honeycomb.
For example: