The yellow figure is a rhombic dodecahedron, and the red pieces form six rhombi which intersect the faces of the yellow figure. There are also hypershort red struts connecting the red rhombi to each other. It’s not exactly a polyhedron, but I had fun making it. I built it using Zome, which you can buy for yourself at http://www.zometool.com.
The polyhedron above is called the rhombic triacontahedron, one of the Catalan solids. Its thirty faces are each golden rhombi — rhombi with diagonals in the golden ratio.
This yellow polyhedron is called the rhombic enneacontahedron. It has ninety faces — sixty wide rhombi, and thirty narrow rhombi.
This third polyhedron is called the rhombic hexecontahedron, and its faces are sixty golden rhombi. It is the 26th stellation of the rhombic triacontahedron. It can also be viewed as an assemblage of twenty golden parallelopipeds, each meeting at the exact center of the polyhedron. A single golden parallelopiped is shown below, and it resembles a cube that has had too much to drink, causing it to lean over.
These four rhombic polyhedra were all constructed from Zome. If you’d like to have some Zome of your own, the website to visit is http://www.zometool.com.
This tessellation is made of blue regular hexagons, as well as rhombi containing 40 and 140 degree angles (red), and rhombi containing 80 and 100 degree angles (yellow).
Is there anything more relaxing than constructing a tessellation?
To make this zonohedron with Stella 4d (available as a free trial download here), start with a dodecahedron, and then perform a zonohedrification based on both faces and vertices. It is similar to the rhombic enneacontahedron, with thirty equilateral octagons replacing the thirty narrow rhombic faces of that polyhedron.
I’ve run into this polyhedron from time to time, and have also had students make it. It is the largest zonohedron which can be built using only red and yellow Zome (available here) of a single strut-length (short, medium, or long). I thought it needed a name, so I made one up.
There’s a special rhombus which is called the “golden rhombus,” because its diagonals are in the golden ratio. To construct it with compass and straight edge, you first construct a golden rectangle (shown with blue edges and a yellow interior), and then connect the midpoints of its sides to form a rhombus (with edges shown in red).
Several polyhedra can be made which use golden rhombi as their faces. The most well-known of these polyhedra is the rhombic triacontahedron, which has 30 such faces. It is the dual of the icosidodecahedron.
If the rhombic triacontahedron is stellated 26 times, the result is the (non-convex) rhombic hexecontahedron. It has 60 golden rhombi as faces.
Both of these polyhedra can be constructed with Zometools (available at http://www.zometool.com). With white Zomeballs and red Zomestruts, these polyhedra look a lot like this:
The flat image at the top of this post was created using Geometer’s Sketchpad and MS-Paint. The four rotating polyhedral images were created using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator, which you can purchase, or try for free, at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
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