Triangular numbers, a 3D cube, and the octahedral group

For some computational geometry project, I had to understand the orbits of the action of the octahedral group on a 3D cube, and like so many times with math, I did it the hard way only to find out later that a simple observation would have saved me the effort. Well, some of the effort.

tl;dr

Upon counting the orbits of the cells of a 3D cube under the octahedral group action, I found out the result is a sum of triangular numbers, which has a very intuitive geometric reason.

The gory details

The octahedral group can be thought of as the group of symmetries obtained by applying a series of 90-degree rotations and/or face-parallel reflections to a cube. Another way of thinking about it is this: if the cube is centered at the origin, applying an element of the group to the cube is equivalent to shuffling the coordinates and/or multiplying some of the coordinates by $-1$. Since there are 6 permutations of the coordinates, and 8 choices as to which coordinates to multiply by $-1$, the number of elements in the group is 48.

For simplicity, let's assume that the 3D cube is actually a discrete object, comprised of $n^3$ cells for some even value of $n$ (having an odd $n$ doesn't change the outcome by a lot, but is a bit different). The group action breaks the cube into orbits, for example, the corner cells form a single orbit of size 8. Note that the group elements can be also thought of as $3\times 3$ matrices, all of whose determinents are $1$ or $-1$ (the latter if the element induces a reflection), and the action thus preserves norms. To put it plainly, the distance of a cell from the cube's center is an invariant of the group action. This observation means that we can think of the cube as comprised of $\frac n 2$ nested hollow cubes of dimensions $n\times n \times n, (n-2)\times(n-2)\times(n-2), ... 4\times 4\times 4, 2\times 2\times 2$, sort of like a matryoshka doll of 3D cubes.

Image credit: Wikipedia

It suffices to understand how the group acts only on one of these hollow cubes, so let's examine only the largest one - the $n\times n\times n$ hollow cube.

Classifying orbits

Suppose the cells are indexed w.r.t. the center of cube, so each cell is indexed by some $i, j, k\in \{-\frac n 2,..., \frac n 2\}\setminus \{0\}$ such that at least one of $i, j, k$ is $\pm \frac n 2$. We omit zero because $n$ is even and no cell is the center cell of the cube.
Observe that using this notation, together with thinking of the group elements as permuting coordinates and/or pointwise multiplying them by $-1$, makes it evident that, up to a permutation, there are only 4 cases, or types of orbits:
Case 1: $\frac n 2 = |i| \neq |j|, |i|\neq |k|, |j| \neq |k|$, choosing such indices defines an orbit of size 48, since no permutation of the coordinates or multiplication of them by $-1$ leaves the indices as they were.
Case 2: $i = |j| = |\frac n 2|, |j|\neq |k|$, these are all the cells that lie on the edges of the hollow cube. A cell with such indices is invariant under elements switching $i$ and $j$, so its orbit's size is 24. To be precise, in the case where $j = -i = \pm \frac n  2$, swapping $i$ and $j$ is just like pointwise multiplying both by $-1$, so the orbit is obtained simply by moving $k$ around and pointwise multiplication by $-1$, and indeed the orbit size is 24.
Case 3: $|i| = |j|, |j| < |k| = \frac n 2$, these are all the cells that lie on the diagonals that run along the face of the hollow cube. For the same arguments as Case 2 - the orbit size here is 24.
Case 4: $|i| = |j| = |k| = \frac n 2$, these are the corner cells. The difference between two corners is only the sign of the coordinates, so the size of such an orbit is 8.

Counting orbits

It is now left to understand how many orbits there are for each case. We choose a representative for each orbit - $(i, j, k)$, and count those.
Case 1: The choice is of some unordered pair of elements from $\{1,2,...,\frac n 2 - 1\}$. The pair is unordered since the group action puts $(i,j,k)$ in the same orbit as $(j,i,k)$, and we omit the negatives since they are obtained via the pointwise multiplication by $-1$. The number of ways to choose such a pair is therefore $\frac 1 2 (\frac n 2 - 1)(\frac n 2 - 2)$.
Case 2: Since $|j|$ and $|i|$ must be equal to $\frac n 2$, the only choice here is of $1\leq k < \frac n 2$ (negative values of $k$ are obtained via the pointwise multiplication by $-1$ of the group action). So clearly there are $\frac n 2 - 1$ of those.
Case 3: Like Case 2, the only choice here is of $1 \leq |i| < \frac n 2$, which in turn determins $|j|$. So there are $\frac n 2 - 1$ such orbits.
Case 4: This is the corners' orbit, so there is exactly one for a hollow cube.

Putting it together, a hollow 3D cube of dimension $n$ has $\frac 1 2 (\frac n 2 - 1)(\frac n 2 - 2) + 2 \cdot (\frac n 2 - 1) + 1 =  \frac 1 8 (n^2 + 2n)$.
Since the full 3D cube, with an even dimension $s$, is comprised of $\frac s 2$ such hollow cubes, the number of orbits is: $\frac 1  8 \sum _{n=1} ^{\frac s 2} ((2n)^2 + 2(2n))$, which surprisingly gives us a sum of triangular numbers $\sum_{n=1} ^{\frac s 2} \frac {n(n+1)} 2$, which has a nice closed form $\frac {\frac s 2 \cdot (\frac s 2 + 1) \cdot (\frac s 2 + 2)} 6$.

Why triangular numbers?

This is a satisfyingly clean formula to ed up with, after a tedious computation, and as one would expect, it is so for a reason:
As noted in the previous paragraph, the result is a sum of triangular numbers, which are called thus because they also represent the number of blocks you'd use to construct a triangle where the bottom row has $n$ blocks, the next row has $n-1$ blocks and so on.
The image below shows one representative of each orbit in the outer layer of an $8\times 8 \times 8$ cube. The Case 1 representatives are red, Case 2 - orange, Case 3 - yellow, and Case 4 - green.

And indeed these representatives form a triangle, and the sum of triangles really represents (sort of) a pyramid that goes from the outer layer of the cube inward, the colorful part of the image below being its base.