A Survey of Right Interior Angles in Hexagons

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A Survey of Right Interior Angles in Hexagons

A regular hexagon, of course, has no right angles, but irregular, convex hexagons can have one, two, or three right angles.

With one right angle, there is only one basic configuration, but, with two right angles, there are three: the right angles may be consecutive, have one non-right angle between them, or be opposite angles.

There are also three possible configurations with three right angles: the three angles can be consecutive, or two can be consecutive with one non-right angle separating the other right angle from the consecutive pair, or every other angle can be a right angle.

Four right angles cannot exist in a convex hexagon, nor can five, nor, of course, six. Four right interior angles are possible, however, for non-convex hexagons, and, again, there are three possible configurations. In the first, the four right angles are consecutive. In the second, three are consecutive, then a non-right angle separates the fourth right angle from the other three. In the third, there are two pairs of consecutive right angles, with single non-right angles separating the pairs on opposite sides of the hexagon.

Dodecahedron Made of Hexagons

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Dodecahedron Made of Hexagons

There’s no immediately obvious connection between hexagons and dodecahedra. I was therefore surprised when I ran into this while playing around with Stella 4d, a program which allows easy polyhedron manipulation. (See www.software3d.com/stella.php for free trial download.) Hexagons, it turns out, work perfectly well to trace out the edges of a dodecahedron, and they need not even be regular to do so.

Twenty Interpenetrating, Rotating Equiangular Golden Hexagons

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Twenty Interpenetrating, Rotating Equiangular Golden Hexagons

Alternating sides of these hexagons have lengths in the Golden Ratio. I created this as a faceting of the rhombicosidodecahedron. It also has faces which are star pentagons and triangles, but those faces are hidden in this view.

(Created using software from www.software3d.com/stella.php)

Cuboctahedral Nulloid

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Cuboctahedral Nulloid

Like all nulloids, this has zero volume. It may be seen as four intersecting, regular hexagons. Some consider nulloids a subset of polyhedra; others do not.

I made this using Stella 4d, which you can find at http://www.software3d.com/stella.php.

Incongruous Mandala

There’s no relationship (of which I am aware) between the Golden Ratio and regular hexagons — so of course I had to try to combine them. The results are yours to judge.

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Snowflake Mandala II

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Snowflake Mandala III

An Odd Tiling of the Plane

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An Odd Tiling of the Plane

An exploration of one way to surround points with hexagons, triangles, and squares.