Having Fun With Zome

This isn’t exactly a polyhedron, or even a polyhedral compound, although it does contain several polyhedra in it. There’s a red rhombic triacontahedron in the center, a blue icosidodecahedron just outside that, and a blue dodecahedron closer to the outside. There are also twelve blue-and-yellow pentagonal pyramids, as well as twenty smaller blue-and-red triangular pyramids. That may not be a complete list, although I did try to include them all. I didn’t build it with the goal of making anything in particular — I was just having fun with Zome. In other words, I was playing.

Zome is available at http://www.zometool.com, if you’d like to try playing with it, or giving it as a gift to someone who would appreciate it. The small parts could cause a choking hazard for babies or toddlers, but they will delight and amaze school-age kids, as well as older people (like me) who still enjoy play for the sake of playing, and doing math for the sake of doing math.

One Possible Definition of Physics

Visual definition of physics

With my metaphorical “mathematics of sets” hat on, this is what physics looks like, to me. The further you go in the field, the more challenging the mathematics gets; also, the better (and more expensive) the toys become.

Richard Feynman, on Computers

feynman on computers