Ludwig Schläfli (Swiss Standard German pronunciation: [ˈluːdvɪɡ ˈʃlɛːfli]; 15 January 1814 – 20 March 1895) was a Swiss mathematician, specialising in geometry and complex analysis (at the time called function theory) who was one of the key figures in developing the notion of higher-dimensional spaces.
In geometry, the Schläfli symbol is a notation of the form that defines regular polytopes and tessellations.
The Schläfli symbol is named after the 19th-century Swiss mathematician Ludwig Schläfli, who generalized Euclidean geometry to more than three dimensions and discovered all their convex regular polytopes, including the six that occur in four dimensions.
In geometry, a 4-polytope (sometimes also called a polychoron, polycell, or polyhedroid) is a four-dimensional polytope. It is a connected and closed figure, composed of lower-dimensional polytopal elements: vertices, edges, faces (polygons), and cells (polyhedra). Each face is shared by exactly two cells. The 4-polytopes were discovered by the Swiss mathematician Ludwig Schläfli before 1853.
The two-dimensional analogue of a 4-polytope is a polygon, and the three-dimensional analogue is a polyhedron.
