Sixty of the faces of this polyhedron are pentagons (orange), and the other 140 are hexagons of three types (blue, pink, and purple). I made it using Stella 4d, a program available at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
I did not discover this polyhedron, although I wish I had, for it has quite a clever design.
The page where I found it (poorly-translated English version, where it’s called the “Trick Johnson,” whatever that means) is at http://www.geocities.jp/ikuro_kotaro/koramu/1053_g2.htm). I generally don’t repost much work by others here, but, for the “Trick Johnson,” I’m making an exception. By appearance, it’s a near-miss to the Johnson solids, based on combining characteristics of the dodecahedron, the snub cube, and the snub dodecahedron. It has chiral four-fold dihedral symmetry.
If you understand Japanese, I’m sure there’s a lot of interesting information at that linked page. If, on the other hand, you don’t, there’s still a good reason to follow that link: making fun of Google-Chrome’s built-in translator.
“Come very! It makes it the.” Say what?
With some work, I was able to figure out how to make my second near-miss candidate from two posts ago, using Stella 4d (available here), but the results show it is a “near near miss,” not a near miss. Like the first one, the triangles are visibly irregular — and so are the green rectangles; there are also four edge lengths, the longest of which is ~11% longer than the shortest. This is not close enough to qualify as a near-miss.
Not long after I made the image above, a friend I shall simply call T. (until and unless I have his permission to publish his full name) e-mailed me his own versions he made, also using Stella. Here’s what they look like. Each can be enlarged with a click.
These are improved in the sense that the triangles (and squares, in the second one) are regular, but this was done at the expense of the pentagons. At the top and bottom of the figures, the edges where pentagons meet other pentagons are ~6.8% shorter than the other edges of each figure.
These last two are more likely to qualify for actual “near-miss” status — that has yet to be decided — but I need to make it clear than I did not discover them alone, but as part of a team. In my versions, after all, the flaws are more severe. Also, we do not yet know whether or not a different individual or team found these same polyhedra earlier, as often happens.
With help from friends on Facebook, I was able to figure out how to make the second of the near-miss candidates in the last post, using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator, a program available here. This is quite helpful, for Stella has a “measurement mode” than lets me determine just how far off from regularity a given polyhedron is. This is what the “unbelted” polyhedron from the last post looks like, with the pentagons regular:
In this polyhedron, although the pentagons are regular, the triangles are scalene, with angles measuring ~55.35, ~60.81, and ~63.84 degrees. Of the three edge lengths needed for this, the longest is ~9.1% longer than the shortest, and the triangles are definitely non-regular — by visual inspection alone. It is possible to “tidy up” the triangles a bit, but only at the cost of making the pentagons visibly irregular. This is enough to make the call on the “unbelted” near-miss candidate from the last post — it’s a “near near miss,” not a true “near miss.”
All polyhedra in the last post, as it turns out, are related to another near-miss, the discovery of which I had nothing to do with. It has six pentagonal faces, and four which are quadrilaterals. This near-miss may be found here: http://www.mathcurve.com/polyedres/enneaedre/enneaedre.shtml.
[Note: see the next post, also, for more about these polyhedra.]
Yesterday, I played for the first time with GeoMag toys, which I recently purchased. I was quite surprised to have what I believe to be a near-miss to the Johnson solids appear before me, one I’ve never seen, within just a few minutes:
Here’s what it looks like, when viewed from two other angles.
The faces of this three-fold dihedral polyedron are six pentagons, twelve triangles, and nine quadrilaterals. The fact that it has been proven that only 92 Johnson solids exist means that all of these faces cannot be regular. However, the irregularity is so small that I could not detect it in this model.
Next, I used Polydrons to build a net of this near-miss candidate.
What to do next was obvious: remove the “belt” of nine quadrilaterals, creating a net for a second near-miss candidate.
Having constructed this net, I then returned GeoMags to build a 3-d model of this second, “unbelted” near-miss candidate.
I then wondered if I could make a third such solid by removal of the triangles, all of which appeared to be the lateral faces of pyramids.
Could I remove them? Yes, and I did so. Did this create a third near-miss candidate? No. The resulting polyhedron, shown immediately above, is non-convex, and therefore cannot be a near-miss. The faces with dihedral angles greater than 180° are the triangle-pairs found where the pyramids were in the previous model.
With the “belted” and “unbelted” polyhedra before this non-convex non-candidate, the next step is to share them with other polyhedra enthusiasts, get their input regarding the question of whether these are genuine near-misses, and see if these polyhedra have already been found, unknown to me, by someone else.
[Update: please see the next two posts for more on these near-miss candidates.]
Any of these images may be enlarged with a click.
They were all created using Stella 4d, available at this website.
I wish I remembered exactly how I made this polyhedron, but I don’t. I found it during a “random walk” polyhedral exploration using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator, software you can buy, or try for free, here.
These polyhedra are all part of the same stellation-series, although it appears they were made with truncation, instead. I found them using Stella 4d, a program you may buy, or try for free, right here: http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php. The smaller images may be enlarged with a click.
The dual of the snub dodecahedron (above) is called the pentagonal hexacontahedron (below, left). The compound of the two is shown below, at right. (Any of the smaller images here may be enlarged with a click.)
Like all chiral polyhedra, both these polyhedra can form compounds with their own mirror-images, as seen below.
Finally, all four polyhedra — two snub dodecahedra, and two pentagonal hexacontahedra — can be combined into a single compound.
This polyhedral manipulation and .gif-making was performed using Stella 4d, a program you can find here.
This zonohedron contains faces which are regular decagons (12 of them), equilateral octagons (30, all of the same type), equilateral hexagons (380 of them, of 7 types, with one of these 7 types, of which there are 20, being regular), squares (60), and non-square rhombi (480 of 8 types, counting reflections as separate types). With each polygon-type, including the reflections, given a different color, this zonohedron looks like this.
If reflected face-types are not counted as separate types, then the coloring-by-face-type uses four fewer colors, and looks like this:
Another view simply colors faces by numbers of sides, and is shown below. Each of these rotating images was created with Stella 4d, a program you may buy, or try for free, at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
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