A Polyhedral Journey, Starting With the Truncated Tetrahedron

Here’s the truncated tetrahedron. It is the simplest of the Archimedean solids.

I decided to “take a walk” with this polyhedron. First, I used Stella 4d (available here) to make the compound of this solid and its dual, the Catalan solid named the triakis tetrahedron.

Next, also using Stella (as I’m doing throughout this polyhedral journey), I formed the convex hull of this polyhedron — a solid made of kites and rhombi.

For the next polyehdron on this journey, I formed the dual of this convex hull. This solid is a symmetrohedron, featuring four regular hexagons, four equillateral triangles, and twelve isosceles triangles.

Next, I used a function of this program called “try to make faces regular.” Some this function works, and sometimes it doesn’t, if it isn’t mathematically possible — as it the case here, where the only thing that remained regular was the equilateral triangles. The hexagons in the resulting solid are equilateral, but not equiangular.

The next thing I did was to examine the dual of this latest polyhedron — another solid made of kites and rhombi, but with broader rhombi and narrower kites.

I then started stellating this solid. The 16th stellation was interesting, so I made a virtual model of it.

Stellating this twice more formed the 18th stellation, which turned out to be a compound of the cube and a “squished” version of the rhombic dodecahedron. This is when I decided that this particular polyhedral journey had come to an end.

Augmenting the Octahedron with Octahedra, Repeatedly.

This is an octahedron.

Octa

If you augment each face of an octahedron with more octahedra, you end up with this.

Augmented Octa

One can then augment each triangular face of this with yet more octahedra.

Aug Augmented Octa

Here’s the next iteration:

Aug Aug Augmented Octa

This could, of course, go on forever, but one more step in the series is all you will see here. I don’t want to get caught in an infinite loop.

next aug Octa

Performing various manipulations of polyhedra is easy with Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator, which I used to make all five of these rotating images. If you’d like to try this program for yourself, just check out http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.