Polyhedron

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Some Polyhedra

Dodecahedron (Regular polyhedron)	Small stellated dodecahedron (Regular star)
Icosidodecahedron (Uniform/Quasiregular)	Great cubicuboctahedron (Uniform star)
Rhombic triacontahedron (Uniform/Quasiregular dual)	Elongated pentagonal cupola (Convex regular-faced)
Octagonal prism (Uniform prism)	Square antiprism (Uniform antiprism)

In elementary geometry, a polyhedron (plural polyhedra or polyhedrons) is a solid in three dimensions with flat faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices. The word polyhedron comes from the Classical Greek πολύεδρον, as poly- (stem of πολύς, "many") + -hedron (form of ἕδρα, "base" or "seat").

Cubes, pyramids and some toroids are examples of polyhedra.

A polyhedron is said to be convex if its surface (comprising its faces, edges and vertices) does not intersect itself and the line segment joining any two points of the polyhedron is contained in the interior or surface.

A polyhedron is a 3-dimensional example of the more general polytope in any number of dimensions.

Basis for definition

A skeletal polyhedron drawn by Leonardo da Vinci to illustrate a book by Luca Pacioli

In elementary geometry, the polygonal faces are regions of planes, meeting in pairs along the edges which are straight-line segments, and with the edges meeting in vertex points. Treating a polyhedron as a solid bounded by flat faces and straight edges is not very precise, for example it is difficult to reconcile with star polyhedra. Grünbaum (1994, p. 43) observed, "The Original Sin in the theory of polyhedra goes back to Euclid, and through Kepler, Poinsot, Cauchy and many others ... [in that] at each stage ... the writers failed to define what are the 'polyhedra' ...." Many definitions of "polyhedron" have been given within particular contexts, some more rigorous than others. For example definitions based on the idea of a bounding surface rather than a solid are common. However such definitions are not always compatible in other mathematical contexts.

One modern approach treats a geometric polyhedron as an injection into real space, a realisation, of some abstract polyhedron. Any such polyhedron can be built up from different kinds of element or entity, each associated with a different number of dimensions:

• 3 dimensions: The interior is the volume bounded by the faces. It might or might not be realised as a solid body.
• 2 dimensions: A face is a polygon bounded by a circuit of edges, and usually also realises the flat (plane) region inside the boundary. These polygonal faces together make up the polyhedral surface.
• 1 dimension: An edge joins one vertex to another and one face to another, and is usually a line segment. The edges together make up the polyhedral skeleton.
• 0 dimensions: A vertex (plural vertices) is a corner point.

Different approaches - and definitions - may require different realisations. Sometimes the interior volume is considered to be part of the polyhedron, sometimes only the surface is considered, and occasionally only the skeleton of edges or even just the set of vertices.

In such elementary geometric and set-based definitions, a polyhedron is typically understood as a three-dimensional example of the more general polytope in any number of dimensions. For example a polygon has a two-dimensional body and no faces, while a 4-polytope has a four-dimensional body and an additional set of three-dimensional "cells".

In other mathematical disciplines, the term "polyhedron" may be used to refer to a variety of specialised constructs, some geometric and others purely algebraic or abstract. The term is sometimes used in such contexts not for a kind of polytope but for something different.

Characteristics

Polyhedral surface

A defining characteristic of almost all kinds of polyhedra is that just two faces join along any common edge. Likewise any edge meets just two vertices, one at each end. These two characteristics are dual to each other and they ensure that the polyhedral surface is continuously connected and does not end abruptly or split off in different directions.

Every simple (non-self-intersecting) polyhedron has at least two faces with the same number of edges.

Topological characteristics

The topological class of a polyhedron is defined by its Euler characteristic and orientability.

From this perspective, any polyhedron may be classed as certain kind of topological manifold. For example a convex or simply-connected polyhedron is a topological sphere or ball (depending on whether its body is taken into account).

Euler characteristic

The Euler characteristic χ relates the number of vertices V, edges E, and faces F of a polyhedron:

$\chi =V-E+F.\$

For a convex polyhedron or more generally for any simply connected polyhedron whose faces are also simply connected, χ = 2.

For more complicated shapes, the Euler characteristic relates to the number of toroidal holes, handles and/or cross-caps in the surface and will be less than 2.

Leonhard Euler's discovery of the characteristic which bears his name marked the beginning of the modern discipline of topology.

Orientability

Some polyhedra, such as all convex polyhedra, have two distinct sides to their surface, for example one side can consistently be coloured black and the other white. We say that the figure is orientable.

But for some polyhedra, such as the tetrahemihexahedron, this is not possible and the surface is effectively one-sided. The polyhedron is said to be non-orientable.

All polyhedra with odd-numbered Euler characteristic are non-orientable. A given figure with even χ < 2 may or may not be orientable. For example the simple toroid and the Klein bottle both have χ = 0, with the first being orientable and the other not.

Duality

For every polyhedron there exists a dual polyhedron having:

• faces in place of the original's vertices and vice versa,
• the same number of edges
• the same Euler characteristic and orientability

The dual of a convex polyhedron and of many other polyhedra can be obtained by the process of polar reciprocation.

Dual polyhedra exist in pairs. The dual of a dual is just the original polyhedron again. Some polyhedra are self-dual, meaning that the dual of the polyhedron is congruent to the original polyhedron.

Vertex figure

{{#invoke:main|main}} For every vertex one can define a vertex figure, which describes the local structure of the figure around the vertex. Precise definitions vary, but a vertex figure can be thought of as the polygon exposed where a slice through the polyhedron cuts off a corner. If the vertex figure is a regular polygon, then the vertex itself is said to be regular.

Volume

Regular polyhedra

Any regular polyhedron can be divided up into congruent pyramids, with each pyramid having a face of the polyhedron as its base and the centre of the polyhedron as its apex. The height of a pyramid is equal to the inradius of the polyhedron. If the area of a face is $A$ and the in-radius is $r$ then the volume of the pyramid is one-third of the base times the height, or $Ar/3$. For a regular polyhedron with $n$ faces, its volume is then simply

${\text{volume}}=nAr/3$.

For instance, a cube with edges of length $L$ has six faces, each face being a square with area $A=L^{2}$. The inradius from the center of the face to the center of the cube is $r=L/2$. Then the volume is given by

${\text{volume}}={\frac {6\cdot L^{2}\cdot {\frac {L}{2}}}{3}}=L^{3},$

the usual formula for the volume of a cube.

Orientable polyhedra

The volume of any orientable polyhedron can be calculated using the divergence theorem. Consider the vector field ${\vec {F}}({\vec {x}})={\frac {1}{3}}{\vec {x}}=({\frac {x_{1}}{3}},{\frac {x_{2}}{3}},{\frac {x_{3}}{3}})$, whose divergence is identically 1. The divergence theorem implies that the volume is equal to a surface integral of $F(x)$:

${\text{volume}}(\Omega )=\int _{\Omega }\nabla \cdot {\vec {F}}d\Omega =\oint _{S}{\vec {F}}\cdot {\hat {n}}dS.$

When Ω is the region enclosed by a polyhedron, since the faces of a polyhedron are planar and have piecewise constant normal vectors, this simplifies to

${\text{volume}}={\frac {1}{3}}\sum _{{\text{face }}i}{\vec {x}}_{i}\cdot {\hat {n}}_{i}A_{i}$

where ${\vec {x}}_{i}$ is the ith face's barycenter, ${\hat {n}}_{i}$ is its normal vector, and $A_{i}$ is its area. Once the faces are decomposed in a set of non-overlapping triangles with surface normals pointing away from the volume, the volume is one sixth of the sum over the triple products of the nine Cartesian vertex coordinates of the triangles.

Since it may be difficult to enumerate the faces, volume computation may be challenging, and hence there exist specialized algorithms to determine the volume (many of these generalize to convex polytopes in higher dimensions).

Names of polyhedra

Polyhedra are often named according to the number of faces. The naming system is again based on Classical Greek, for example tetrahedron (4), pentahedron (5), hexahedron (6), heptahedron (7), triacontahedron (30), and so on. Sometimes this is qualified by a description of the kinds of faces present, for example the rhombic dodecahedron vs. the pentagonal dodecahedron.

Some polyhedra have gained common names, for example the regular hexahedron is commonly known as the cube. Others are named after their discoverer, such as Miller's monster or the Szilassi polyhedron.

Other common names indicate that some operation has been performed on a simpler polyhedron, for example the truncated cube looks like a cube with its corners cut off, and has 14 faces (so it is also an example of a tetrakaidecahedron or tetradecahedron).

Convex polyhedra

Convex polyhedron blocks on display at the Universum museum in Mexico City

A polyhedron is said to be convex if its surface (comprising its faces, edges and vertices) does not intersect itself and the line segment joining any two points of the polyhedron is contained in the interior or surface. A convex polyhedron is sometimes defined as a convex set of points in space, the intersection of a set of half-spaces, or the convex hull of a set of points. However many such definitions cannot easily be extended to include self-intersecting figures such as star polyhedra.

Important classes of convex polyhedra include the highly symmetrical Platonic solids, Archimedean solids and Archimedean duals or Catalan solids, and the regular-faced deltahedra and Johnson solids.

Convex polyhedra, and especially triangular pyramids or 3-simplexes, are important in many areas of mathematics, especially those relating to topology.

Symmetrical polyhedra

Many of the most studied polyhedra are highly symmetrical.

A symmetrical polyhedron can be rotated and superimposed on its original position such that its faces and so on have changed position. All the elements which can be superimposed on each other in this way are said to lie in a given "symmetry orbit". For example all the faces of a cube lie in one orbit, while all the edges lie in another. If all the elements of a given dimension, say all the faces, lie in the same orbit, the figure is said to be "transitive" on that orbit. For example a cube has one kind of face so it face-transitive, while a truncated cube has two kinds of face and is not.

Of course it is easy to distort such polyhedra so they are no longer symmetrical. But where a polyhedral name is given, such as icosidodecahedron, the most symmetrical geometry is almost always implied, unless otherwise stated.

There are several types of highly symmetric polyhedron, classified by which kind of element - faces, edges and/or vertices - belong to a single symmetry orbit:

• Regular if it is vertex-transitive, edge-transitive and face-transitive (this implies that every face is the same regular polygon; it also implies that every vertex is regular).
• Quasi-regular if it is vertex-transitive and edge-transitive (and hence has regular faces) but not face-transitive. A quasi-regular dual is face-transitive and edge-transitive (and hence every vertex is regular) but not vertex-transitive.
• Semi-regular if it is vertex-transitive but not edge-transitive, and every face is a regular polygon. (This is one of several definitions of the term, depending on author. Some definitions overlap with the quasi-regular class). A semi-regular dual is face-transitive but not vertex-transitive, and every vertex is regular.
• Uniform if it is vertex-transitive and every face is a regular polygon, i.e. it is regular, quasi-regular or semi-regular. A uniform dual is face-transitive and has regular vertices, but is not necessarily vertex-transitive).
• Isogonal or vertex-transitive if all vertices are the same, in the sense that for any two vertices there exists a symmetry of the polyhedron mapping the first isometrically onto the second.
• Isotoxal or edge-transitive if all edges are the same, in the sense that for any two edges there exists a symmetry of the polyhedron mapping the first isometrically onto the second.
• Isohedral or face-transitive if all faces are the same, in the sense that for any two faces there exists a symmetry of the polyhedron mapping the first isometrically onto the second.
• Noble if it is face-transitive and vertex-transitive (but not necessarily edge-transitive). The regular polyhedra are also noble; they are the only noble uniform polyhedra.

A polyhedron can belong to the same overall symmetry group as one of higher symmetry, but will be of lower symmetry if it has several groups of elements in different symmetry orbits. For example the truncated cube has its triangles and octagons in different orbits.

Regular polyhedra

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Regular polyhedra are the most highly symmetrical. Altogether there are nine regular polyhedra.

The five convex examples have been known since antiquity and are called the Platonic solids. Plato did not discover them, but he was the first to give instructions on how to construct them all. These are the triangular pyramid or tetrahedron, cube (regular hexahedron), octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron:

There are also four regular star polyhedra, known as the Kepler-Poinsot polyhedra after their discoverers.

Uniform polyhedra and their duals

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Uniform polyhedra are vertex-transitive and every face is a regular polygon. They may be regular, quasi-regular, or semi-regular, and may be convex or starry.

The uniform duals are face-transitive and every vertex figure is a regular polygon.

Face-transitivity of a polyhedron corresponds to vertex-transitivity of the dual and conversely, and edge-transitivity of a polyhedron corresponds to edge-transitivity of the dual. The dual of a regular polyhedron is also regular. The dual of a non-regular uniform polyhedron (called a Catalan solid if convex) has irregular faces.

Each uniform polyhedron shares the same symmetry as its dual, with the symmetries of faces and vertices simply swapped over. Because of this some authorities regard the duals as uniform too. But this idea is not held widely: a polyhedron and its symmetries are not the same thing.

The uniform polyhedra and their duals are traditionally classified according to their degree of symmetry, and whether they are convex or not.

	Convex uniform	Convex uniform dual	Star uniform	Star uniform dual
Regular	Platonic solids		Kepler-Poinsot polyhedra
Quasiregular	Archimedean solids	Catalan solids	(no special name)	(no special name)
Semiregular			(no special name)	(no special name)
	Prisms	Dipyramids	Star prisms	Star dipyramids
	Antiprisms	Trapezohedra	Star antiprisms	Star trapezohedra

Pyramids

{{#invoke:main|main}} Symmetrical pyramids include some of the most time-honoured and famous of all polyhedra, such as the four-sided Egyptian pyramids.

Noble polyhedra

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A noble polyhedron is both isohedral (equal-faced) and isogonal (equal-cornered), but not necessarily equal-sided. Besides the regular polyhedra, there are many other examples.

The dual of a noble polyhedron is also noble.

Symmetry groups

The polyhedral symmetry groups (using Schoenflies notation) are all point groups and include:

• T - chiral tetrahedral symmetry; the rotation group for a regular tetrahedron; order 12.
• T_d - full tetrahedral symmetry; the symmetry group for a regular tetrahedron; order 24.
• T_h - pyritohedral symmetry; order 24. The symmetry of a pyritohedron.
• O - chiral octahedral symmetry;the rotation group of the cube and octahedron; order 24.
• O_h - full octahedral symmetry; the symmetry group of the cube and octahedron; order 48.
• I - chiral icosahedral symmetry; the rotation group of the icosahedron and the dodecahedron; order 60.
• I_h - full icosahedral symmetry; the symmetry group of the icosahedron and the dodecahedron; order 120.
• C_nv - n-fold pyramidal symmetry
• D_nh - n-fold prismatic symmetry
• D_nv - n-fold antiprismatic symmetry.

Those with chiral symmetry do not have reflection symmetry and hence have two enantiomorphous forms which are reflections of each other. The snub Archimedean polyhedra have this property.

Polyhedra with regular faces

Besides the regular and uniform polyhedra, there are some other classes which have regular faces but lower overall symmetry.

Equal regular faces

Convex polyhedra where every face is the same kind of regular polygon may be found among three families:

• Triangles: These polyhedra are called deltahedra. There are eight convex deltahedra, comprising three of the regular (Platonic) polyhedra and five non-uniform examples.

• Squares: The cube is the only convex example. Others can be obtained by joining cubes together, although care must be taken if coplanar faces are to be avoided.

• Pentagons: The regular dodecahedron is the only convex example.

Polyhedra with congruent regular faces of six or more sides are all non-convex, because the vertex of three regular hexagons defines a plane.

The total number of convex polyhedra with equal regular faces is thus ten, comprising the five Platonic solids and the five non-uniform deltahedra.

There are infinitely many non-convex examples. Infinite sponge-like examples called infinite skew polyhedra exist in some of these families.

Johnson solids

{{#invoke:main|main}} Norman Johnson sought which convex non-uniform polyhedra had regular faces, although not necessarily all alike. In 1966, he published a list of 92 such solids, gave them names and numbers, and conjectured that there were no others. Victor Zalgaller proved in 1969 that the list of these Johnson solids was complete.

Other important families of polyhedra

Stellations and facettings

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Stellation of a polyhedron is the process of extending the faces (within their planes) so that they meet to form a new polyhedron.

It is the exact reciprocal to the process of facetting which is the process of removing parts of a polyhedron without creating any new vertices.

Zonohedra

{{#invoke:main|main}} A zonohedron is a convex polyhedron where every face is a polygon with inversion symmetry or, equivalently, symmetry under rotations through 180°.

Toroidal polyhedra

{{#invoke:main|main}} A toroidal polyhedron is a polyhedron with an Euler characteristic of 0 or smaller, equivalent to a genus of 1 or greater, representing a torus surface having one or more holes through the middle.

Spacefilling polyhedra

{{#invoke:main|main}} A spacefilling polyhedron packs with copies of itself to fill space. Such a close-packing or spacefilling is often called a tessellation of space or a honeycomb. Some honeycombs involve more than one kind of polyhedron.

Compounds

{{#invoke:main|main}} A polyhedral compound is made of two or more polyhedra sharing a common centre.

Symmetrical compounds often share the same vertices as other well-known polyhedra and may often also be formed by stellation. Some are listed in the list of Wenninger polyhedron models.

Orthogonal polyhedra

An orthogonal polyhedron is one all of whose faces meet at right angles, and all of whose edges are parallel to axes of a Cartesian coordinate system. Aside from a rectangular box, orthogonal polyhedra are nonconvex. They are the 3D analogs of 2D orthogonal polygons, also known as rectilinear polygons. Orthogonal polyhedra are used in computational geometry, where their constrained structure has enabled advances on problems unsolved for arbitrary polyhedra, for example, unfolding the surface of a polyhedron to a polygonal net.Template:Fact

Generalisations of polyhedra

The name 'polyhedron' has come to be used for a variety of objects having similar structural properties to traditional polyhedra.

Apeirohedra

A classical polyhedral surface comprises finite, bounded plane regions, joined in pairs along edges. If such a surface extends indefinitely it is called an apeirohedron. Examples include:

• Tilings or tessellations of the plane.
• Sponge-like structures called infinite skew polyhedra.

Complex polyhedra

{{#invoke:main|main}} A complex polyhedron is one which is constructed in complex Hilbert 3-space. This space has six dimensions: three real ones corresponding to ordinary space, with each accompanied by an imaginary dimension. A complex polyhedron is mathematically more closely related to configurations than to real polyhedra.

Curved polyhedra

Some fields of study allow polyhedra to have curved faces and edges.

Spherical polyhedra

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The surface of a sphere may be divided by line segments into bounded regions, to form a spherical polyhedron. Much of the theory of symmetrical polyhedra is most conveniently derived in this way.

Spherical polyhedra have a long and respectable history:

• The first known man-made polyhedra are spherical polyhedra carved in stone.
• Poinsot used spherical polyhedra to discover the four regular star polyhedra.
• Coxeter used them to enumerate all but one of the uniform polyhedra.

Some polyhedra, such as hosohedra and dihedra, exist only as spherical polyhedra and have no flat-faced analogue.

Curved spacefilling polyhedra

Two important types are:

• Bubbles in froths and foams, such as Weaire-Phelan bubbles.
• Spacefilling forms used in architecture.

Hollow-faced or skeletal polyhedra

It is not necessary to fill in the face of a figure before we can call it a polyhedron. For example Leonardo da Vinci devised frame models of the regular solids, which he drew for Pacioli's book Divina Proportione. In modern times, Branko Grünbaum (1994) made a special study of this class of polyhedra, in which he developed an early idea of abstract polyhedra. He defined a face as a cyclically ordered set of vertices, and allowed faces to be skew as well as planar.

Alternative usages

From the latter half of the twentieth century, various mathematical constructs have been found to have properties also present in traditional polyhedra. Rather than confining the term "polyhedron" to describe a three-dimensional polytope, it has been adopted to describe various related but distinct kinds of structure.

General polyhedra

A polyhedron has been defined as a set of points in real affine (or Euclidean) space of any dimension n that has flat sides. It may alternatively be defined as the union of a finite number of convex polyhedra, where a convex polyhedron is any point set that is the intersection of a finite number of half-spaces. Unlike an elementary polyhedron, it may be bounded or unbounded. In this meaning, a polytope is a bounded polyhedron.Template:Fact

Analytically, such a convex polyhedron is expressed as the solution set for a system of linear inequalities. Defining polyhedra in this way provides a geometric perspective for problems in linear programming.

Many traditional polyhedral forms are general polyhedra. Other examples include:

• A quadrant in the plane. For instance, the region of the cartesian plane consisting of all points above the horizontal axis and to the right of the vertical axis: { ( x, y ) : x ≥ 0, y ≥ 0 }. Its sides are the two positive axes, and it is otherwise unbounded.
• An octant in Euclidean 3-space, { ( x, y, z ) : x ≥ 0, y ≥ 0, z ≥ 0 }.
• A prism of infinite extent. For instance a doubly infinite square prism in 3-space, consisting of a square in the xy-plane swept along the z-axis: { ( x, y, z ) : 0 ≤ x ≤ 1, 0 ≤ y ≤ 1 }.
• Each cell in a Voronoi tessellation is a convex polyhedron. In the Voronoi tessellation of a set S, the cell A corresponding to a point c∈S is bounded (hence a traditional polyhedron) when c lies in the interior of the convex hull of S, and otherwise (when c lies on the boundary of the convex hull of S) A is unbounded.

Topological polyhedra

A topological polytope is a topological space given along with a specific decomposition into shapes that are topologically equivalent to convex polytopes and that are attached to each other in a regular way.

Such a figure is called simplicial if each of its regions is a simplex, i.e. in an n-dimensional space each region has n+1 vertices. The dual of a simplicial polytope is called simple. Similarly, a widely studied class of polytopes (polyhedra) is that of cubical polyhedra, when the basic building block is an n-dimensional cube.

Abstract polyhedra

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An abstract polytope is a partially ordered set (poset) of elements whose partial ordering obeys certain rules of incidence (connectivity) and ranking. The elements of the set correspond to the vertices, edges, faces and so on of the polytope: vertices have rank 0, edges rank 1, etc. with the partially ordered ranking corresponding to the dimensionality of the geometric elements. The empty set, required by set theory, has a rank of −1 and is sometimes said to correspond to the null polytope. An abstract polyhedron is an abstract polytope having the following ranking:

• rank 3: The maximal element, sometimes identified with the body.
• rank 2: The polygonal faces.
• rank 1: The edges.
• rank 0: the vertices.
• rank −1: The empty set, sometimes identified with the null polytope.

Any geometric polyhedron is then said to be a "realization" in real space of the abstract poset.

Polyhedra as graphs

Any polyhedron gives rise to a graph, or skeleton, with corresponding vertices and edges. Thus graph terminology and properties can be applied to polyhedra. For example:

• Due to Steinitz theorem convex polyhedra are in one-to-one correspondence with 3-connected planar graphs.
• The tetrahedron gives rise to a complete graph (K₄). It is the only polyhedron to do so.
• The octahedron gives rise to a strongly regular graph, because adjacent vertices always have two common neighbors, and non-adjacent vertices have four.
• The Archimedean solids give rise to regular graphs: 7 of the Archimedean solids are of degree 3, 4 of degree 4, and the remaining 2 are chiral pairs of degree 5.

History

Prehistory

Polyhedra appeared in early architectural forms such as cubes and cuboids, with the earliest four-sided pyramids of ancient Egypt also dating from the Stone Age.

The Etruscans preceded the Greeks in their awareness of at least some of the regular polyhedra, as evidenced by the discovery near Padua (in Northern Italy) in the late 19th century of a dodecahedron made of soapstone, and dating back more than 2,500 years (Lindemann, 1987).

Greeks

The earliest known written records of these shapes come from Classical Greek authors, who also gave the first known mathematical description of them. The earlier Greeks were interested primarily in the convex regular polyhedra, which came to be known as the Platonic solids. Pythagoras knew at least three of them, and Theaetetus (circa 417 B. C.) described all five. Eventually, Euclid described their construction in his Elements. Later, Archimedes expanded his study to the convex uniform polyhedra which now bear his name. His original work is lost and his solids come down to us through Pappus.

Chinese

Cubical gaming dice in China have been dated back as early as 600 B.C.

By 236 AD, Liu Hui was describing the dissection of the cube into its characteristic tetrahedron (orthoscheme) and related solids, using assemblages of these solids as the basis for calculating volumes of earth to be moved during engineering excavations.

Islamic

After the end of the Classical era, scholars in the Islamic civilisation continued to take the Greek knowledge forward (see Mathematics in medieval Islam).

The 9th century scholar Thabit ibn Qurra gave formulae for calculating the volumes of polyhedra such as truncated pyramids.

Then in the 10th century Abu'l Wafa described the convex regular and quasiregular spherical polyhedra.

Renaissance

As with other areas of Greek thought maintained and enhanced by Islamic scholars, Western interest in polyhedra revived during the Italian Renaissance. Artists constructed skeletal polyhedra, depicting them from life as a part of their investigations into perspective. Several appear in marquetry panels of the period. Piero della Francesca gave the first written description of direct geometrical construction of such perspective views of polyhedra. Leonardo da Vinci made skeletal models of several polyhedra and drew illustrations of them for a book by Pacioli. A painting by an anonymous artist of Pacioli and a pupil depicts a glass rhombicuboctahedron half-filled with water.

As the Renaissance spread beyond Italy, later artists such as Wenzel Jamnitzer, Dürer and others also depicted polyhedra of various kinds, many of them novel, in imaginative etchings.

Star polyhedra

For almost 2,000 years, the concept of a polyhedron as a convex solid had remained as developed by the ancient Greek mathematicians.

During the Renaissance star forms were discovered. A marble tarsia in the floor of St. Mark's Basilica, Venice, depicts a stellated dodecahedron. Artists such as Wenzel Jamnitzer delighted in depicting novel star-like forms of increasing complexity.

Johannes Kepler (1571 - 1630) used star polygons, typically pentagrams, to build star polyhedra. Some of these figures may have been discovered before Kepler's time, but he was the first to recognize that they could be considered "regular" if one removed the restriction that regular polytopes must be convex. Later, Louis Poinsot realised that star vertex figures (circuits around each corner) can also be used, and discovered the remaining two regular star polyhedra. Cauchy proved Poinsot's list complete, and Cayley gave them their accepted English names: (Kepler's) the small stellated dodecahedron and great stellated dodecahedron, and (Poinsot's) the great icosahedron and great dodecahedron. Collectively they are called the Kepler-Poinsot polyhedra.

The Kepler-Poinsot polyhedra may be constructed from the Platonic solids by a process called stellation. Most stellations are not regular. The study of stellations of the Platonic solids was given a big push by H. S. M. Coxeter and others in 1938, with the now famous paper The 59 icosahedra.

The reciprocal process to stellation is called facetting (or faceting). Every stellation of one polytope is dual, or reciprocal, to some facetting of the dual polytope. The regular star polyhedra can also be obtained by facetting the Platonic solids. Template:Harvnb listed the simpler facettings of the dodecahedron, and reciprocated them to discover a stellation of the icosahedron that was missing from the set of "59". More have been discovered since, and the story is not yet ended.

See also:

• Regular polyhedron: History
• Regular polytope: History of discovery.

Polyhedra in nature

For natural occurrences of regular polyhedra, see Regular polyhedron: Regular polyhedra in nature.

Irregular polyhedra appear in nature as crystals.

See also

• Defect
• Deltohedron
• M. C. Escher
• Extension of a polyhedron
• Flexible polyhedra
• Goldberg polyhedron
• Images of polyhedra
• Near-miss Johnson solid
• Net (polyhedron)
• Polyhedral compound
• Polyhedron models
• Schlegel diagram
• Spidron
• Stella (software)
• Trapezohedron
• Zonohedron

References

Notes

Sources Template:Refbegin

• Cromwell, P.;Polyhedra, CUP hbk (1997), pbk. (1999).
• {{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=book }}

• Grünbaum, B.; Are your polyhedra the same as my polyhedra? Discrete and comput. geom: the Goodman-Pollack festschrift, ed. Aronov et al. Springer (2003) pp. 461–488. (pdf)

Books on polyhedra

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External links

General theory

• Weisstein, Eric W., "Polyhedron", MathWorld.
• Polyhedra Pages
• Uniform Solution for Uniform Polyhedra by Dr. Zvi Har'El
• Symmetry, Crystals and Polyhedra

Lists and databases of polyhedra

• Virtual Reality Polyhedra - The Encyclopedia of Polyhedra
• Electronic Geometry Models - Contains a peer reviewed selection of polyhedra with unusual properties.
• Polyhedron Models - Virtual polyhedra
• Paper Models of Uniform (and other) Polyhedra

Free software

• A Plethora of Polyhedra – An interactive and free collection of polyhedra in Java. Features includes nets, planar sections, duals, truncations and stellations of more than 300 polyhedra.
• Hyperspace Star Polytope Slicer - Explorer java applet, includes a variety of 3d viewer options.
• openSCAD - Free cross-platform software for programmers. Polyhedra are just one of the things you can model. The openSCAD User Manual is also available.
• OpenVolumeMesh - An open source cross-platform C++ library for handling polyhedral meshes. Developed by the Aachen Computer Graphics Group, RWTH Aachen University.
• Polyhedronisme - Web-based tool for generating polyhedra models using Conway Polyhedron Notation. Models can be exported as 2D PNG images, or as 3D OBJ or VRML2 files. The 3D files can be opened in CAD software, or uploaded for 3D printing at services such as Shapeways.

Resources for making physical models

• Paper Models of Polyhedra Free nets of polyhedra
• Simple instructions for building over 30 paper polyhedra
• Polyhedra plaited with paper strips - Polyhedra models constructed without use of glue.