The subject's own index

The groups

Every group this site draws, what it is made of, and every essay that draws it. The rows are read out of the essays rather than maintained, so a group's entry grows when an essay draws it.

A field says which part of the subject an essay belongs to and a ladder says what else there is to say about one idea. This is the third index the subject asks for and the most obvious one: the groups themselves. A reader who arrives holding a symbol wants the pictures of that symbol wherever they were drawn, and a reader who has just met p4g wants to know it is also on four other pages arguing about something else entirely.

There are 17 wallpaper groups and 7 frieze groups, and every one of them is drawn somewhere here — 452 appearances in all. Neither count is typed into this page. Both are the length of a list this site enumerates rather than quotes, and the appearances are found by reading every essay for figure calls and picking the symbols out of their arguments.

Each symbol below is derived from the group's own operations rather than copied from a table: the operations are generated, each reflection is sorted by the direction it reverses, and the letters are read off what is actually there. The derivation is required to arrive back at the standard name, so a wrong convention would show up as a symbol that does not match. What the characters mean, position by position, is on the notation page.

Every card carries the group's own pattern, generated from a three-point motif and then handed to a detector that rediscovers the group from the drawing. Nothing on this page is an illustration of a group: each one is the group, drawn.

The seventeen

Grouped by the lattice each one needs, which is the constraint that produces the classification in the first place. Inside names the groups that contain this one as a maximal subgroup.

oblique lattice 2 groups

rectangular lattice 5 groups

centred rectangular lattice 2 groups

square lattice 3 groups

The wallpaper group p4. A pattern with the symmetry of p4, generated by applying the group's 4 operations to an asymmetric motif and repeating across the lattice. The symmetries of the result were then found independently and match the group exactly.

p4strictly p411

4 operations modulo translations · 4-fold rotation

insidep4mp4g

Drawn in 49 essays, by 33 generators

abelian · antiphase · cayley · colour-classes · compose · coset-table · disorder · domain-index · extension-count · folded-flat · friedel · fundamental-domain · generating-set · isomorphic-subgroup · k-star · motif-matters · normaliser · one-hand · operation · orbit-build · orbit-count · order-parameter · phase-problem · phase-relations · seventeen · superstructure · twin-diffraction · twin-plate · two-colour · wallpaper · window-size · word-form · wyckoff

The wallpaper group p4m. A pattern with the symmetry of p4m, generated by applying the group's 8 operations to an asymmetric motif and repeating across the lattice. The symmetries of the result were then found independently and match the group exactly.

p4mstrictly p4mm

8 operations modulo translations · 4-fold rotation

inside nothing on this lattice — it is maximal

Drawn in 42 essays, by 23 generators

cayley · colour-classes · compose · disorder · domain-index · extension-count · folded-flat · fundamental-domain · isomorphic-subgroup · k-bands · k-star · motif-matters · normaliser · one-hand · orbit-count · order-parameter · product · seventeen · subgroup-kinds · tolerance · two-colour · wallpaper · wyckoff

hexagonal lattice 5 groups

The seven friezes

The same classification with one translation direction instead of two, where the argument is short enough to check by hand.

A frieze symbol has three positions rather than two and drops nothing: a strip's two directions — across it and along it — are never interchangeable, so p1m1 keeps the trailing 1 that p4mm is allowed to lose.

How to read the symbols · All ladders · All seventeen on one plate · The figure library