Semisymmetric Graphs from Polytopes Barry Monson¤ University of New Brunswick Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada E3B 5A3 (
[email protected]) Toma·z Pisanskiy University of Ljubljana, FMF Jadranska 19, Ljubljana 1111, Slovenia; and Faculty of Education, University of Primorska, Cankarjeva 5, Koper 6000, Slovenia (
[email protected]) Egon Schultez Northeastern University Boston MA 02115, USA (
[email protected]) Asia Ivi¶c Weissx York University Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3 (
[email protected]) Abstract Every ¯nite, self-dual, regular (or chiral) 4-polytope of type f3;q;3g has a trivalent 3-transitive (or 2-transitive) medial layer graph. Here, by drop- ping self-duality, we obtain a construction for semisymmetric trivalent graphs (which are edge- but not vertex-transitive). In particular, the Gray graph arises as the medial layer graph of a certain universal locally toroidal regular 4-polytope. Key Words: semisymmetric graphs, abstract regular and chiral polytopes. AMS Subject Classi¯cation (1991): Primary: 05C25. Secondary: 51M20. ¤Supported by the NSERC of Canada, grant 4818 ySupported by Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technolgy of Slovenia grants P1-0294,J1-6062,L1-7230. zSupported by NSA-grant H98230-05-1-0027 xSupported by the NSERC of Canada, grant 8857 1 1 Introduction The theory of symmetric trivalent graphs and the theory of regular polytopes are each abundant sources of beautiful mathematical ideas. In [22], two of the authors established some general and unexpected connections between the two subjects, building upon a rich variety of examples appearing in the literature (see [4], [7], [10], [11], [28] and [29]). Here we develop these connections a little further, with speci¯c focus on semisymmetric graphs.