Cube

In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. The cube can also be called a regular hexahedron and is one of the five Platonic solids. It is a special kind of square prism, of rectangular parallelepiped and of trigonal trapezohedron. The cube is dual to the octahedron. It has cubical symmetry (also called octahedral symmetry). It is special by being a Cuboid and a Rhombohedron.
A cube is the three-dimensional case of the more general concept of a hypercube.
It has 11 nets. To colour the cube so that no two adjacent faces have the same colour, one would need at least 3 colours.
If the original cube has edge length 1, its dual octahedron has edge length


For a cube centered at the origin, with edges parallel to the axes and with an edge length of 2, the Cartesian coordinates of the vertices are

(±1, ±1, ±1)

while the interior consists of all points (x₀, x₁, x₂) with −1 < x _i < 1.

As the volume of a cube is the third power of its sides a×a×a, third powers are called cubes, by analogy with squares and second powers.
A cube has the largest volume among cuboids (rectangular boxes) with a given surface area. Also, a cube has the largest volume among cuboids with the same total linear size (length + width + height).
The cube is the cell of the only regular tiling of Euclidean space. It is also unique among the Platonic solids in having faces with an even number of sides and, consequently, it is the only member of that group that is a zonohedron (every face has point symmetry).
The cube can be cut into 6 identical square pyramids. If these square pyramids are then attached to the faces of a second cube, a rhombic dodecahedron is obtained (with pairs of coplanar triangles combined into rhombic faces.)
The analogue of a cube in four-dimensional Euclidean space has a special name—a tesseract or (rarely) hypercube.
The analogue of the cube in n-dimensional Euclidean space is called a hypercube or n-dimensional cube or simply n-cube. It is also called a measure polytope.
There are analogues of the cube in lower dimensions too: a point in dimension 0, a segment in one dimension and a square in two dimensions.
The vertices of a cube can be grouped into two groups of four, each forming a regular tetrahedron; more generally this is referred to as a demicube. These two together form a regular compound, the stella octangula. The intersection of the two forms a regular octahedron. The symmetries of a regular tetrahedron correspond to those of a cube which map each tetrahedron to itself; the other symmetries of the cube map the two to each other.
One such regular tetrahedron has a volume of ⅓ of that of the cube. The remaining space consists of four equal irregular tetrahedra with a volume of 1/6 of that of the cube, each.
The rectified cube is the cuboctahedron. If smaller corners are cut off we get a polyhedron with 6 octagonal faces and 8 triangular ones. In particular we can get regular octagons (truncated cube). The rhombicuboctahedron is obtained by cutting off both corners and edges to the correct amount.
A cube can be inscribed in a dodecahedron so that each vertex of the cube is a vertex of the dodecahedron and each edge is a diagonal of one of the dodecahedron's faces; taking all such cubes gives rise to the regular compound of five cubes.
If two opposite corners of a cube are truncated at the depth of the 3 vertices directly connected to them, an irregular octahedron is obtained. Eight of these irregular octahedra can be attached to the triangular faces of a regular octahedron to obtain the cuboctahedron.