Topological Crystallography

Geometry in ancient Greece is said to have originated in the curiosity of mathematicians about the shapes of crystals, with that curiosity culminating in the classification of regular convex polyhedra addressed in the final volume of Euclid’s Elements. Since then, geometry has taken its own path and the study of crystals has not been a central theme in mathematics, with the exception of Kepler’s work on snowflakes. Only in the nineteenth century did mathematics begin to play a role in crystallography as group theory came to be applied to the morphology of crystals. This…