In order to have a planar realization of Alan Schoen’s tetrons and cubons, we need to add a few coins to our currency. Here are the 24 coins you’ll need:
Below is an example how to decorate three cube skeletons with them. This doesn’t look as pretty as the 3D-cubons, but one can much more easily play with them. Coins need to be placed on the vertices of a graph so that the two arrows that share an edge have the same color and point in consistent directions.
What other pretty cubic graphs are out there? The Foster census lists one cubic symmetric graph with 24 vertices (the Nauru-graph), and it is a challenge quite in Alan’s spirit to try to decorate it with his 24 cubon-coins. This is indeed possible:
The above representation of the Nauru graph lives in a hexagonal torus. It is also the dual graph of the Octahedral 3¹² polyhedral surface, which is the genus 4 quotient of a triply periodic polyhedron by its period lattice. Here is a picture of it. Note that this is twice a fundamental piece, as the period lattice is spanned by the half main diagonals of the cube.
Octahedral 3¹² is intimately related to Alan Schoen’s I-WP surface. Everything we do at a certain depth is connected to everything else, it seems.
The Inner Frame 