the heart of Studio Infinity, MakeStream articles show structures – and frequently how to make them – that exhibit interesting design ideas, often inspired by mathematics.
I will be leading a group construction of a 3.4m diameter rhombic enneacontahedron next Tuesday, 2022 Oct 11, on the campus of Dickinson College. This is the first time that I will be leading a construction using this system — dubbed ZipStix at the NYC math museum — with rhombic faces rather than regular polygons.
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I was recently invited at the last minute to lead a mathematical construction for a seminar for math majors at Loyola Marymount University. The hope was to create something physical connected with one of the topics in the course, which linked the history of mathematics with various unsolved problems, among other things. Since there had been a fair amount of discussion about the Pythagorean Theorem, we settled on the following construction that demonstrates an interesting and less-familiar related phenomenon in three dimensions.
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With all of the recent activity at Studio Infinity on geometric units that can be automatically cut and scored, it was natural for the S∞ G4G14 giveaway to be the 14-sided Truncated Octahedron, which tessellates to fill space.
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These are the assembly instructions for the Tessellating Truncated Octahedra; you’ll find background and the cut files for them on them in the following post.
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Another aspect of the PCMI session on Illustrating Math was a series of exploratory, hands-on workshops. One of them focused, in part, on the design of modules like the one for the truncated triakis tetrahedron, but based on other existing modular origami units.
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For the actual building event mentioned in the previous post (linked above), participants could choose from a variety of target polyhedra. The origami inspiration was the PHiZZ unit, which stands for Pentgons Hexagons in Zig Zag, so the ideal targets consist of just pentagons and hexagons. With Euler’s formula for polyhedra and a little calculation you can determine that such a shape must have exactly twelve pentagons and almost any number of hexagons; the page for the event includes a table of candidates.
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In many ways, modular origami is ideally suited for the type of exploratory mathematical play that S∞ is dedicated to: it’s easy to get started, very tactile, and offers nearly endless opportunities for creating interesting and beautiful objects. For example, here’s a PHiZZ unit torus that resulted from a workshop I led at The Brearley School (photo courtesy of Maggie Maluf).
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This is a sequel to a (pre-pandemic) post about weaving a stellated polyhedron. This time, I’d like to show how similar techniques can also be used to create a “great stellated dodecahedron” (“GSD” for short; illustration below).
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After seeing Laura Taalman’s inspiring 3d print, it occurred to me that one could also render the edge-to-edge cubical array of dodecahedra contemplated in this earlier post in an analogous way. Plus, I just received a new Prusa SL1 printer, and needed something to try it out on.
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When I showed this recent post to my friend and colleague Laura Taalman, aka mathgrrl, she suggested that another approach to creating a model of the underlying structure would be to construct the icosahedra themselves (rather than the negative space), except use wireframes of the icosahedra rather than solid ones to avoid obscuring all of the internal structure. Her encouragement motivated me to create a new OpenSCAD file for this.
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Judging from at least one of the previous projects, Studio Infinity is intrigued with connecting polyhedra edge-to-edge. (Of course, connecting them face-to-face is interesting, too, but that’s pretty familiar from Legos and such; and vertex-to-vertex is the same as connecting dual polyhedra face-to-face.)
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This MathStream post about why an icosahedron inscribes in a cube also shows that a dodecahedron fits into a cube in an analogous way. That raised the prospect that it might also be worth building an “Antidodec” analogous to the Anticos.
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