Tag Archives: recreational mathematics

494 Circles, Each, Adorning Two Great Rhombcuboctahedra, with Different (Apparent) Levels of Anxiety

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Trunc Cubocta

The design on each face of these great rhombcuboctahedra is made from 19 circles, and was created using both Geometer’s Sketchpad and MS-Paint. I then used a third program, Stella 4d (available here), to project this image on each of a great rhombcuboctahedron’s 26 faces, creating the image above.

If you watch carefully, you should notice an odd “jumping” effect on the red, octagonal faces in the polyhedron above, almost as if this polyhedron is suffering from an anxiety disorder, but trying to conceal it. Since I like that effect, I’m leaving it in the picture above, and then creating a new image, below, with no “jumpiness.” Bragging rights go to the first person who, in a comment to this post, figures out how I eliminated this anxiety-mimicking effect, and what caused it in the first place. 

Trunc Cubocta

Your first hint is that no anti-anxiety medications were used. After all, these polyhedra do not have prescriptions for anything. How does one “calm down” an “anxious” great rhombcuboctahedron, then?

On a related note, it is amazing, to me, that simply writing about anxiety serves the purpose of reducing my own anxiety-levels. It is an effect I’ve noticed before, so I call it “therapeutic writing.” That helped me, as it has helped me before. (It is, of course, no substitute for getting therapy from a licensed therapist, and following that therapist.) However, therapeutic writing can’t explain how this “anxious polyhedron” was helped, for polyhedra can’t write.

For a second hint, see below.

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Second hint: the second image uses approximately twice as much memory-storage space as the first image used.

How I Found the Nagel Line While Playing with Triangles

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Several days recently swirled down the drain in a depression-spiral. Needing a way out, I spent my Saturday morning playing with triangles, after first getting plenty of sleep. It worked. This technique, however, probably would not transfer to those who are not geometry obsessives. Perhaps any favorite activity would work? I leave that to others to explore.

Here’s what I did that worked for me:

ImageThe original triangle is ABC, and is in bold black. The bold blue line is its Euler Line, and contains the orthocenter (M), circumcenter (G), nine-point center (K), and centroid (point W). It does not, however, contain the incenter (S).

It struck me as odd that the incenter would be different in this way, so I investigated it further. It is the point of concurrence of the three angle bisectors of a triangle. On a lark, I constructed the midsegments of triangle ABC, forming a new, smaller triangle, shown in red. When I then found the incenter of this smaller triangle (Z), it appeared to be collinear with S and W. I checked; it was, and this line is shown in bold yellow. Moreover, the process could be continued with even smaller midsegment-triangle incenters, and they were also on this yellow line.

I wondered if I had discovered something new, and started to check. It didn’t take long to find out that Nagel had beaten me to it. The Nagel line is the official name of this yellow line I stumbled upon, and here is my source:  http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NagelLine.html — but, as far as I know, I did discover that these midsegment-derived points also lie on the Nagel line.

Someone else may have known this before, of coruse. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter to me, for I had my fun morning playing with triangles, and now feel better than I have in days.

[Side note:  this is my 100th post, and I’d like to thank all my readers and followers, and also thank, especially, those who encouraged me to try WordPress to get a fresh start after Tumblr-burnout. It worked!]

 

Speculation Related to the Johnson Solids

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Consider all possible convex polyhedra which have regular polygons as faces. Remove from this set the five Platonic Solids:

Next, remove the thirteen Archimedean Solids:

Now remove the infinite sets of prisms and antiprisms, the beginning of which are shown here:

What’s left? The answer to this question is known; it’s the set of Johnson Solids. It has been proven that there are exactly 92 of them:

When Norman Johnson systematically found all of these, and named them, in the late 1960s, he found a number of other polyhedra which were extremely close to being in this set. These are called the “near misses.” An example of a near-miss is the tetrated dodecahedron:

If you go to http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php, you can download a free trial version of software, Stella 4d, written by a friend of mine, Robert Webb, which I used to generate this last image. This program has a built-in library of near-misses . . . but it doesn’t have all of them.

Well, why not? The reason is simple: the near-misses have no precise definition. They are simply “almost,” but not quite, Johnson Solids. In the case of the tetrated dodecahedron, what keeps it from being a Johnson Solid is the edges where yellow triangles meet other yellow triangles. These edges must be ~7% longer than the other edges, so the yellow triangles, unlike the other faces, are not quite regular — merely close.

There is no way to justify an arbitrary rule for just how close a near-miss must be to “Johnsonhood” be considered an “official” near-miss, so mathematicians have made no such rule. Research to find more near-misses is ongoing, and, due to the “fuzziness” of the definition, may never stop.

I’ve played a small part in such research, myself. I’ve also been asked how much I’ve been paid for doing this work, but that question misses the point. I’ve collected no money from this, and nobody gets involved in such research in order to get rich. Those of us who do such things are motivated by the desire to have fun through indulgence of mathematical curiosity. Our reward is the pure enjoyment of trying to figure things out, and, on really good days, actually doing so.

I’m having a good day. I’m looking at the Johnson Solids in a different way, purely for fun. I have found something that may be a blind alley, but, if my fellow geometricians show me that it is, that won’t erase the fun I have already had.

Here’s what I have found today. It is not a near-miss in the same way as the tetrated dodecahedron, but is related to the Johnson Solids in a different way. Other than a “heptadecahedron” (for its seventeen faces) it has no name, as of yet:

How is this different from traditional near-misses? Please examine the net (third image). In this heptadecahedron, all of these triangles, pentagons, and the one decagon are perfectly regular, unlike the situation with traditional near-misses. However, some faces, as you can see in the 3-d model, are made of multiple, coplanar equilateral triangles, joined together. In the blue faces, two such triangles form a rhombus; in the yellow faces, three such triangles form an isosceles trapezoid. Since they are coplanar and adjacent, they are one face each, not two, nor three. The dashed lines are not folded in the 3-d model, but merely show where the equilateral triangles are.

Traditional near-misses involve relaxation of the rules for Johnson Solids to permit polyhedra with not-quite-regular faces to join a new “club.”

Well, this heptadecahedron is in a different “club.” To join it, a polyhedron must  fit the criteria for “Johnsonhood,” except that some faces may be formed by amalgamation of multiple, coplanar regular polygons.

My current subject of speculation is this: would this new club have an infinite or a finite number of members? If finite, it will, I think, be a larger number than 92. If finite, it will also be a more interesting topic to study.

I don’t know, yet, what answer this new problem has. I do know I am having fun, though. Also known: no one will pay me for this.  No one needs to, either.