I created this using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator, available at www.software3d.com/Stella.php. Faceting involves connecting different sets of vertices (relative to the original polyhedron) to form new edges and faces. The new edges and faces, both, typically intersect each other, although often not as many times as in this particular example of a faceted polyhedron.
These are the third (above) and fifth (below) stellations of the triamond pentagonal bifrustrum, which I previously posted here: https://robertlovespi.wordpress.com/2014/07/30/my-lost-discovery-from-2006-the-triamond-pentagonal-bifrustrum/. These rotating images are made with Stella 4d, a program available at www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
The images on the faces of this polyhedron are based on information sent from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter, as seen at http://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/lola/feature-20110705.html and tweeted by @LRO_NASA, which has been happily tweeting about its fifth anniversary in a polar lunar orbit recently. I have no idea whether this is actually an A.I. onboard the LRO, or simply someone at NASA getting paid to have fun on Twitter.
To get these images from near the Lunar South Pole onto the faces of a rhombic enneacontahedron, and then create this rotating image, I used Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator. There is no better tool available for polyhedral research. To check this program out for yourself, simply visit www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
Music: the first two tracks from the Murder By Death album Like the Excorcist, But More Breakdancing. Please visit their website, http://www.murderbydeath.com, to buy this band’s music and merchandise. While you’re there, I recommend checking their concert calendar, to see if they may be playing near you soon. Murder By Death concerts, which I’ve seen six times now, are not to be missed!
Visuals: rotating polyhedra, all with icosidodecahedral symmetry, generated using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator, which you can try for yourself at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php. The polyhedra shown are, in order of appearance:
I’ve posted polyhedral cages before — it simply never occurred to me to call such objects by that term. I often tag them as art / geometrical art, rather than mathematics, for they are not true polyhedra, by the generally accepted definition, where edges must involve faces meeting in pairs. Polyhedral cages do not follow this rule, so calling them mathematics causes problems. To do mathematics, after all, is to play games with numbers, and other ideas, according to the rules, with these rules being discovered as we discover new theorems. The rules are respected for one reason alone: we know they work. If one breaks these rules with, say, a geometric figure, on aesthetic grounds, one is crossing the boundary between mathematics and geometrical art.
The reason for hiding faces of polyhedra is usually aesthetic, not mathematical. I use software called Stella 4d, available at www.software3d.com/Stella.php, to manipulate polyhedra in numerous different ways, trying to discover “new” polyhedra — new, that is, in the sense that these discoveries (not inventions) were never seen before I saw them on my computer screen. When you see a rotating geometrical picture on this blog, such as any of the ones at the bottom of this post, it was created using Stella.
Every now and then, I stumble upon a polyhedron which would look better if selected faces were simply made to disappear — and with Stella, that’s easy. They still exist in the polyhedron, in Stella‘s “mind,” but are rendered invisible in the on-screen image, thus creating the appearance of holes in the polyhedron’s surface. If these holes are regarded as real — “real” in the somewhat confusing sense that there’s nothing where the holes are, holes being absences of what surrounds them — then the former polyhedron is now a polyhedral cage. Here are several examples.
I made this using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator, software you may try for yourself at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
I made all of these using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator. You may try this software for yourself at www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
I just had the strange experience of encountering a polyhedral discovery of mine on the Internet from about eight years ago — one that I had completely forgotten, but had shared with others, who posted it online, and were kind enough to give me credit for the discovery. It’s the fifth polyhedron shown on this page: http://www.interocitors.com/polyhedra/Triamonds/ — and is shown with a .stel file, so I was able to use polyhedral-manipulation-and-imaging software, Stella 4d (available at www.software3d.com/Stella.php) to make a rotating image of it:
It’s a member of a class of polyhedra which have, as faces, only regular polygons with unit size, as well as “triamonds.” Triamonds are 1:1:1:2 trapezoids composed of three coplanar, equilateral triangles.
Back in 2006 or earlier, my guess is that I simply made a physical model out of card-stock paper and tape, and then took a photograph of it — something I haven’t done in a very long time, now that making moving pictures of virtual models has become so easy. Another possibility is that I used Zome, an excellent ball-and-stick modelling system available at www.zometool.com. Zome, like Stella, I still use — and I will be using Zome often with students, in class, when school starts next month. Fortunately, I have a lot of Zome!
Many polyhedra appear in finite sets. The most well-known example of such a set is the five Platonic solids. Many know them from role-playing games.
Other finite sets include the thirteen Archimedean, four Kepler-Poinsot, thirteen Catalan, and 92 Johnson solids, and the eight convex deltahedra, among others. There is even a finite set, the near-misses, with an unknown number of members, due to the “fuzziness” of its definition. The symmetrohedra is another set with “fuzzy” criteria, but there are still only so many symmetrohedra to be found. We simply haven’t found them all yet, or, if we have, we don’t know that we have, but it would not be reasonable to claim that infinitely many await discovery.
However, not all groups of polyhedra are finite. Some polyhedra appear, instead, in infinite families. What is needed to generate such infinite families (at the cost of some forms of symmetry, compared to, say, Platonic or Archimedean solids) is the use of bases — special polyhedral faces which play a stronger role in the determination of that polyhedron’s shape than do the other faces. For the familar prism, there are two bases.
In a pentagonal prism, the bases are pentagons, as seen above. For a pentagonal prism, n = 5, for n is simply the number of sides of the base. The smallest value of n which is possible, 3, yields a triangular prism. There’s no upper limit for n, either. Here’s a regular hexacontagonal prism, where each base has sixty sides.
Obviously, n can be increased without limit, although for very large values of n, the prism will be hard to distinguish from a cylinder.
Another infinite family may be found by taking the dual of each prism. This is the dual of the pentagonal prism:
Taking a dual of a prism produces a dipyramid, with its n-gonal base hidden between the puramids, but with no guarantee that the triangular faces will be regular — and in this case, they are not. It is possible for a pentagonal dipyramid to have only regular faces . . .
. . . but regular faces will not work if n = 6 (because the dipyramid collapses to zero height), or indeed any number other than 3, 4, or 5. Therefore, dipyramids will not be an infinite family unless non-equilateral triangles are permitted as faces.
Half of a dipyramid, of course, is simply a pyramid, with the single base now visible:
Like the dipyramids, and for the same reason, there are only three pyramids (n = 3, 4, or 5) which can have all faces regular. An infinite family of right, regular pyramids do exist, though, if isosceles triangles are permitted as lateral faces.
While pyramids and dipyramids have only one base each, the already-described prisms have two. Prisms also can maintain regularity of all faces, no matter how large n becomes, unlike pyramids and dipyramids. Moreover, prisms can be transformed into another infinite family of regular-faced polyhedra by rotating one base by one half of one-nth of a rotation, relative to the other base, and replacing the n square lateral faces with 2n equilateral triangles. These polyhedra are called antiprisms. The pentagonal antiprism looks like this:
Antiprisms with all faces regular do not have the “only 3, 4, and 5” limitation that affected the pyramids and dipyramids. For example, here is one with all faces regular, and dodecagonal bases:
One more infinite family of polyhedra may be found, using the antiprisms: their duals. The dual of the pentagonal antiprism looks like this:
There is no regularity of faces for any members of this family with n > 3, for their faces are kites. (When n = 3, the kites become squares, and the polyhedron formed is simply a cube.) Unfortunately, “kiteohedron” looks ridiculous, and sounds worse, so efforts have been made to find better names for these polyhedra. “Deltohedra” has been used, but is too easily confused with the deltahedra, which are quite different. The best names yet invented for this infinite family of kite-faced polyhedra are, in my opinion, the antidipyramids, and the trapezohedra.
(Note: the rotating polyhedral images above were generated using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator, available at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.)
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