Manifolds of Spherical Tessellations

The spherical tessellations are represented by the platonic solids or regular polyhedra. Thus the set of positions of a platonic solid inscribed in the 2-sphere S2 is a closed 3-manifold. The fundamental group of such a manifold is an extension of ℤ₂ by the group of isometries of the platonic solid. The subgroup ℤ₂ is the center of the group. The manifold can be thought of as the spherical tangent bundle of a 2-dimensional spherical orbifold, or as a 3-dimensional spherical orbifold, i.e. the quotient of S3 under a finite subgroup of SO(4). Some material of this chapter was borrowed in part from [DuV].