Truncated Octahedron - Coordinates and Permutohedron

Coordinates and Permutohedron

All permutations of (0, ±1, ±2) are Cartesian coordinates of the vertices of a truncated octahedron of edge length a = √ 2 centered at the origin. The vertices are thus also the corners of 12 rectangles whose long edges are parallel to the coordinate axes.

The edge vectors have Cartesian coordinates (0,± 1,±1) and permutations of these. The face normals (normalized cross products of edges that share a common vertex) of the 6 square faces are (0,0,±1), (0,±1,0) and (±1,0,0). The face normals of the 8 hexagonal faces are (± 1/√ 3, ± 1/√ 3, ± 1/√3). The dot product between pairs of two face normals is the cosine of the dihedral angle between adjacent faces, either -1/3 or -1/√3. The dihedral angle is approximately 1.910633 rad (109.471 °  A156546) at edges shared by two hexagons or 2.186276 rad (125.263 °  A195698) at edges shared by a hexagon and a square.

The truncated octahedron can also be represented by even more symmetric coordinates in four dimensions: all permutations of (1, 2, 3, 4) form the vertices of a truncated octahedron in the three-dimensional subspace x + y + z + w = 10. Therefore, the truncated octahedron is the permutohedron of order 4.