For some reason, I like having my age be a prime number of years. Today, I turn 47, so I get to have a prime-number-age for a whole year now. This hasn’t happened since I was 43, so I made this 47-pointed star to celebrate:
I also make birthday-stars for composite-number ages as well, just because it’s fun, and you can find at least two others on this blog, on January 12, in past years. Also, I wouldn’t want to have to wait until I’m 53 (my next prime age) to make another one of these.
At the moment, I certainly don’t feel 47. There are times when I feel twenty-two . . .
There are also times when I feel six.
At the moment, however, I feel about thirty. For that reason, I put the 47-pointed stars on the thirty faces of a rotating rhombic triacontahedron, because (a) it’s my birthday, (b) I want to, and (c) I can.
Image/music credits:
I created this using Geometer’s Sketchpad and MS-Paint.
“When Yer Twenty-Two,” by The Flaming Lips, via a YouTube posting.
Two panels from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, by Bill Watterson. (Calvin is perpetually six years old.)
Created using the image at the top of this post, and the program Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator, which is available here.
In this icosidodecahedron, the pentagonal faces have been removed, and the triangular faces have been augmented with short pyramids. I used Stella 4d to make it, which you can find here.
To make the virtual “painting” above, I plotted simple and moderately-complex trigonometric functions on a single coordinate plane, as shown below, using Geometer’s Sketchpad. I then erased all the text, etc., copied-and-pasted a screenshot into MS-Paint, and used that program to make the finished image above.
This tiling-pattern could be continued indefinitely, while still maintaining its five-fold radial symmetry, giving it the overall appearance of a pentagon.
This uses enlarged spheres centered on the dodecahedron’s vertices, overlapping so that they obscure the edges. Also, the faces are rendered invisible. I created it using Stella 4d, available at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
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