Number and twistedness of strands in weavings on regular convex polyhedra

This paper deals with two- and threefold weavings on Platonic polyhedral surfaces. Depending on the skewness of the weaving pattern with respect to the edges of the polyhedra, different numbers of closed strands are necessary in a complete weaving. The problem is present in basketry but can be addressed from the aspect of pure geometry (geodesics), graph theory (central circuits of 4-valent graphs) and even structural engineering (fastenings on a closed surface). Numbers of these strands are found to have a periodicity and symmetry, and, in some cases, this number can be predicted directly from the skewness of weaving. In this paper (i) a simple recursive method using symmetry operations is given to find the number of strands of cubic, octahedral and icosahedral weavings for cases where generic symmetry arguments fail; (ii) another simple method is presented to decide whether or not a single closed strand can run along the underlying Platonic without a turn (i.e. the linking number of the two edges of a strand is zero, and so the loop can be stretched to a circle without being twisted); and (iii) the linking number of individual strands in an alternate 'check' weaving pattern is determined.