Uniform 8-polytope

In eight-dimensional geometry, an eight-dimensional polytope or 8-polytope is a polytope contained by 7-polytope facets. Each 6-polytope ridge being shared by exactly two 7-polytope facets.

A uniform 8-polytope is one which is vertex-transitive, and constructed from uniform 7-polytope facets.

Regular 8-polytopes

Regular 8-polytopes can be represented by the Schläfli symbol {p,q,r,s,t,u,v}, with v {p,q,r,s,t,u} 7-polytope facets around each peak.

There are exactly three such convex regular 8-polytopes:

There are no nonconvex regular 8-polytopes.

Characteristics

The topology of any given 8-polytope is defined by its Betti numbers and torsion coefficients.

The value of the Euler characteristic used to characterise polyhedra does not generalize usefully to higher dimensions, and is zero for all 8-polytopes, whatever their underlying topology. This inadequacy of the Euler characteristic to reliably distinguish between different topologies in higher dimensions led to the discovery of the more sophisticated Betti numbers.