Its Coxeter symbol is 221, describing its bifurcating Coxeter-Dynkin diagram, with a single ring on the end of one of the 2-node sequences. He also studied[2] its connection with the 27 lines on the cubic surface, which are naturally in correspondence with the vertices of 221.
The rectified 221 is constructed by points at the mid-edges of the 221. The birectified 221 is constructed by points at the triangle face centers of the 221, and is the same as the rectified 122.
For visualization this 6-dimensional polytope is often displayed in a special skewed orthographic projection direction that fits its 27 vertices within a 12-gonal regular polygon (called a Petrie polygon). Its 216 edges are drawn between 2 rings of 12 vertices, and 3 vertices projected into the center. Higher elements (faces, cells, etc.) can also be extracted and drawn on this projection.
Removing the node on the short branch leaves the 5-simplex, .
Removing the node on the end of the 2-length branch leaves the 5-orthoplex in its alternated form: (211), .
Every simplex facet touches a 5-orthoplex facet, while alternate facets of the orthoplex touch either a simplex or another orthoplex.
The vertex figure is determined by removing the ringed node and ringing the neighboring node. This makes 5-demicube (121 polytope), . The edge-figure is the vertex figure of the vertex figure, a rectified 5-cell, (021 polytope), .
Vertices are colored by their multiplicity in this projection, in progressive order: red, orange, yellow. The number of vertices by color are given in parentheses.
The 221 is related to the 24-cell by a geometric folding of the E6/F4 Coxeter-Dynkin diagrams. This can be seen in the Coxeter plane projections. The 24 vertices of the 24-cell are projected in the same two rings as seen in the 221.
E6
F4
221
24-cell
This polytope can tessellate Euclidean 6-space, forming the 222 honeycomb with this Coxeter-Dynkin diagram: .
^Coxeter, H.S.M. (1940). "The Polytope 221 Whose Twenty-Seven Vertices Correspond to the Lines on the General Cubic Surface". Amer. J. Math. 62 (1): 457–486. doi:10.2307/2371466. JSTOR2371466.
T. Gosset: On the Regular and Semi-Regular Figures in Space of n Dimensions, Messenger of Mathematics, Macmillan, 1900
Elte, E. L. (1912), The Semiregular Polytopes of the Hyperspaces, Groningen: University of Groningen
Kaleidoscopes: Selected Writings of H.S.M. Coxeter, edited by F. Arthur Sherk, Peter McMullen, Anthony C. Thompson, Asia Ivic Weiss, Wiley-Interscience Publication, 1995, ISBN978-0-471-01003-6[1]
(Paper 17) Coxeter, The Evolution of Coxeter-Dynkin diagrams, [Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde 9 (1991) 233-248] See figure 1: (p. 232) (Node-edge graph of polytope)