Flying Kites into the Snub Dodecahedron, a Dozen at a Time, Using Tetrahedral Stellation

Posted on 12 June 2015 by RobertLovesPi

I’ve been shown, by the program’s creator, a function of Stella 4d which was previously unknown to me, and I’ve been having fun playing around with it. It works like this: you start with a polyhedron with, say, icosidodecahedral symmetry, set the program to view it as a figure with only tetrahedral symmetry (that’s the part which is new to me), and then stellate the polyhedron repeatedly. (Note: you can try a free trial download of this program here.) Several recent posts here have featured polyhedra created using this method. For this one, I started with the snub dodecahedron, one of two Archimedean solids which is chiral.

Using typical stellation (as opposed to this new variety), stellating the snub dodecahedron once turns all of the yellow triangles in the figure above into kites, covering each of the red triangles in the process. With “tetrahedral stellation,” though, this can be done in stages, producing a greater variety of snub-dodecahedron variants which feature kites. As it turns out, the kites appear twelve at a time, in four sets of three, with positions corresponding to the vertices (or the faces) of a tetrahedron. Here’s the first one, featuring one dozen kites.

Having done this once (and also changing the colors, just for fun), I did it again, resulting in a snub-dodecahedron-variant featuring two dozen kites. At this level, the positions of the kite-triads correspond to those of the vertices of a cube.

You probably know what’s coming next: adding another dozen kites, for a total of 36, in twelve sets of three kites each. At this point, it is the remaining, non-stellated four-triangle panels, not the kite triads, which have positions corresponding to those of the vertices of a cube (or the faces of an octahedron, if you prefer).

Incoming next: another dozen kites, for a total of 48 kites, or 16 kite-triads. The four remaining non-stellated panels of four triangles each are now arranged tetrahedrally, just as the kite-triads were, when the first dozen kites were added.

With one more iteration of this process, no triangles remain, for all have been replaced by kites — sixty (five dozen) in all. This is also the first “normal” stellation of the snub dodecahedron, as mentioned near the beginning of this post.

From beginning to end, these polyhedra never lost their chirality, nor had it reversed.

A Compound of the Octahedron, and a Pyritohedral Dodecahedron

Posted on 12 June 2015 by RobertLovesPi

This compound is the first I have seen which combines a Platonic solid (the blue octahedron) with a pyritohedral modification of a Platonic solid. Here’s what a pyritohedral dodecahedron looks like, by itself:

Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator was used to make these — software you can try right here: http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.

A (Possible) New Near-Miss to the Johnson Solids

Posted on 12 June 2015 by RobertLovesPi

In the polyhedron above, the octagons, hexagons, and triangles are regular. The only irregularities are found in the near-squares, which are actually isosceles trapezoids with three edges of equal length: the ones shared with the octagons and hexagons. The trapezoid-edges adjacent to the triangles, however, are ~15.89% longer than its other three edges. As a result, two of the interior angles of the trapezoids measure ~85.44º (the ones nearest the triangles), while the other two (adjacent to the shorter of the two trapezoid bases) measure ~94.56º. In a rotating model, it can be difficult to see the irregularities in these trapezoids. Were someone to build an actual physical model, however, the fact that they are not squares would be far more obvious.

In case someone would like to build such a model, here is a net you can use.

As you can see on this Wikipedia page, near-misses are not precisely defined — nor can they be, without such a definition (including something such as “no edge may be more than 10% longer than any other) being unjustifiably arbitrary. Instead, new near-miss candidates are discussed among members of the small community of polyhedral enthusiasts with an interest in near-misses, and are either admitted to the set of recognized near-misses, or not, based on consensus of opinion. This isn’t an entirely satisfactory system, but it’s the best we have, and may even be the best system possible.

The shortest definition for “near-miss Johnson solid” is simply “a polyhedron which is almost a Johnson solid.” Recently, a new (and even more informal) term has been created: the “near near-miss,” for polyhedra which are almost near-misses, but with deviations from regularity which are too large, by consensus of opinion, to be called near-misses. This polyhedron may well end up labeled a “near near-miss,” rather than a genuine near-miss.

Several questions remain at this point, and once I have found the answers, I will update this post to include them.

Is this close enough to being a Johnson solid to be called a near-miss, or merely a “near near-miss?”
Has this polyhedron already been found before? It looks quite familiar to me, and so it is entirely possible I have seen it before, and have simply forgotten when and where I saw it. On the other hand, this “I’ve seen it before” feeling may be caused by this polyhedron’s similarity to the great rhombcuboctahedron (also known as the truncated cuboctahedron, and a few other names), one of the Archimedean solids.
Does this polyhedron already have a name?
If unnamed at this time, what name would be suitable for it?

All the images in this post were created using Stella 4d, and I also used this software to obtain the numerical data given above. A free trial download of this program is available, and you can find it at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php. Also, since it was mentioned above, I’ll close this post with a rotating image of the great rhombcuboctahedron. Perhaps a suitable name for the near-miss candidate above would be the “expanded great rhombcuboctahedron,” although it is entirely possible that a better name will be found.

Update #1: I now remember where I’ve seen this before: right here on my own blog! You can find that post here. I could delete this, as a duplicate post, but am choosing not to. One reason: the paths I took to create these two identical polyhedra were entirely different. Another reason is that this post includes information not included the first time around.

Update #2: This was already discussed among my circle of polyhedral enthusiasts. As I now recall, the irregularity in the quadrilaterals was agreed to be too large to call this a true “near-miss,” so, clearly, it’s a “near near-miss” instead.