Polytope
/ˈpɑlɪtoʊp/noun
A geometric figure with flat sides in any number of dimensions, generalising the polygon and the polyhedron.
The Greek roots
Literally: “many places”
The story of the word
Reinhold Hoppe coined Polytop in German in the 1880s for the n-dimensional relative of the polygon and the polyhedron. Alicia Boole Stott, daughter of the logician George Boole and largely self-taught, brought the term into English along with her cardboard models of four-dimensional solids. The second half is τόπος, place, chosen to match the pattern of -gon and -hedron rather than for any spatial sense of its own.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → German scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- c. 1900
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Linear programming searches the corners of a convex polytope for the best solution.
The 120-cell is the four-dimensional polytope she found most beautiful.