TITLE: What's the difference between "duality" and "symmetry" in mathematics?
QUESTION [13 upvotes]: Motivated by the answer to this question--"What kind of “symmetry” is the symmetric group about?", I read the article about dual graph. It is said in this article that "the term 'dual' is used because this property is symmetric, meaning that if H is a dual of G, then G is a dual of H (if G is connected)." In mathematics, duality is a very important phenomenon and one may immediately come up with lots of examples(e.g., dual space in functional analysis). At the same times, there are many different kinds of symmetry in mathematics. This wiki article points out that "A high-level concept related to symmetry is mathematical duality.".
Here is my question:

What's the difference and relationship between "duality" and "symmetry"?

REPLY [6 votes]: An algebraic, geometric or combinatorial object $\Omega$, consisting of a "ground set" $O$, and provided with additional structure elements like a metric, edges, binary operations, etc., may have symmetries. A  symmetry is the same thing as an automorphism, i.e., a bijective map $\phi: \ O\to O$ such that any relevant relation among the elements $x\in O$ is preserved. This means that if, e.g., it matters that $x*y=z$ then one should have $\phi(x)*\phi(y)=\phi(z)$. Sometimes a symmetry $\phi$ has the property that $\phi$ is not the identity, but $\phi\circ\phi$ is. Such a $\phi$ is called an involution.
Now the concept of duality is a different matter. A duality is an involution not of a single object, but of a whole theory. Examples are the duality present (a) in plane projective geometry or (b) in the theory of convex polyhedra.
Ad (a): To each theorem in PPG corresponds its dual theorem. The dual of Pascal's theorem about $6$ points on a conic is Brianchon's theorem about $6$ tangents to a conic.
Ad (b): An individual polyhedron, say a platonic solid, may have an interesting set of symmetries. But duality is something far deeper. It says that to any such polyhedron $P$, symmetric or not, corresponds a dual polyhedron $\hat P$, such that incidences among the vertices, edges, and faces of $P$ appear in $\hat P$ reversed. The dual of an dodecahedron is an icosahedron.