Characterisation of geodesic self-dual regular surface triangulations

Abstract

We consider triangulations of closed surfaces in which every vertex is incident to exactly $d$ edges. These triangulations can be identified with subgroups of the triangle group $\langle a,b,c\mid a^2,b^2,c^2,(ab)^3,(ac)^2,(bc)^d\rangle$ that intersect $\langle a,b\rangle$, $\langle a,c\rangle$, and $\langle b,c\rangle$ trivially. The term geodesic duality refers to an external symmetry introduced by Wilson in 1979. Our main result is the characterisation of all subgroups corresponding to geodesic self--dual regular triangulations, together with a complete enumeration for $d < 10$.