In geometry, the inscribed sphere or insphere of a convex polyhedron is a sphere that is contained within the polyhedron and tangent to each of the polyhedron's faces. It is the largest sphere that is contained wholly within the polyhedron, and is dual to the dual polyhedron's circumsphere.
The radius of the sphere inscribed in a polyhedron P is called the inradius of P.
All regular polyhedra have inscribed spheres, but most irregular polyhedra do not have all facets tangent to a common sphere, although it is still possible to define the largest contained sphere for such shapes. For such cases, the notion of an insphere does not seem to have been properly defined and various interpretations of an insphere are to be found:
Often these spheres coincide, leading to confusion as to exactly what properties define the insphere for polyhedra where they do not coincide.
For example, the regular small stellated dodecahedron has a sphere tangent to all faces, while a larger sphere can still be fitted inside the polyhedron. Which is the insphere? Important authorities such as Coxeter or Cundy & Rollett are clear enough that the face-tangent sphere is the insphere. Again, such authorities agree that the Archimedean polyhedra (having regular faces and equivalent vertices) have no inspheres while the Archimedean dual or Catalan polyhedra do have inspheres. But many authors fail to respect such distinctions and assume other definitions for the 'inspheres' of their polyhedra.
In geometry, every polyhedron is associated with a second dual figure, where the vertices of one correspond to the faces of the other, and the edges between pairs of vertices of one correspond to the edges between pairs of faces of the other. Such dual figures remain combinatorial or abstract polyhedra, but not all are also geometric polyhedra. Starting with any given polyhedron, the dual of its dual is the original polyhedron.
In geometry, an icosidodecahedron is a polyhedron with twenty (icosi) triangular faces and twelve (dodeca) pentagonal faces. An icosidodecahedron has 30 identical vertices, with two triangles and two pentagons meeting at each, and 60 identical edges, each separating a triangle from a pentagon. As such it is one of the Archimedean solids and more particularly, a quasiregular polyhedron.
In geometry, a polyhedron is a three-dimensional shape with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices. The word polyhedron comes from the Classical Greek πολύεδρον, as poly- + -hedron.
A Platonic solid is a convex regular polyhedron in three-dimensional Euclidean space. Being a regular polyhedron means that the faces are congruent regular polygons, and the same number of faces meet at each vertex. There are five and only five such polyhedra:
In geometry, a 4-polytope is a four-dimensional polytope. It is a connected and closed figure, composed of lower-dimensional polytopal elements: vertices, edges, faces (polygons), and cells (polyhedra). Each face is shared by exactly two cells. The 4-polytopes were discovered by the Swiss mathematician Ludwig Schläfli before 1853.
In geometry, the rhombicuboctahedron, or small rhombicuboctahedron, is an Archimedean solid with eight triangular and eighteen square faces. There are 24 identical vertices, with one triangle and three squares meeting at each one. The polyhedron has octahedral symmetry, like the cube and octahedron. Its dual is called the deltoidal icositetrahedron or trapezoidal icositetrahedron, although its faces are not really true trapezoids.
In geometry, the truncated icosidodecahedron is an Archimedean solid, one of thirteen convex isogonal nonprismatic solids constructed by two or more types of regular polygon faces.
A regular polyhedron is a polyhedron whose symmetry group acts transitively on its flags. A regular polyhedron is highly symmetrical, being all of edge-transitive, vertex-transitive and face-transitive. In classical contexts, many different equivalent definitions are used; a common one is that the faces are congruent regular polygons which are assembled in the same way around each vertex.
In geometry, a disdyakis triacontahedron, hexakis icosahedron, decakis dodecahedron or kisrhombic triacontahedron is a Catalan solid with 120 faces and the dual to the Archimedean truncated icosidodecahedron. As such it is face uniform but with irregular face polygons. It slightly resembles an inflated rhombic triacontahedron—if one replaces each face of the rhombic triacontahedron with a single vertex and four triangles in a regular fashion one ends up with a disdyakis triacontahedron. That is, the disdyakis triacontahedron is the Kleetope of the rhombic triacontahedron. It also has the most faces among the Archimedean and Catalan solids, with the snub dodecahedron, with 92 faces, in second place.
In geometry, a circumscribed sphere of a polyhedron is a sphere that contains the polyhedron and touches each of the polyhedron's vertices. The word circumsphere is sometimes used to mean the same thing, by analogy with the term circumcircle. As in the case of two-dimensional circumscribed circles, the radius of a sphere circumscribed around a polyhedron P is called the circumradius of P, and the center point of this sphere is called the circumcenter of P.
In geometry, a vertex figure, broadly speaking, is the figure exposed when a corner of a polyhedron or polytope is sliced off.
The term semiregular polyhedron is used variously by different authors.
A uniform polyhedron has regular polygons as faces and is vertex-transitive. It follows that all vertices are congruent.
In geometry, a vertex configuration is a shorthand notation for representing the vertex figure of a polyhedron or tiling as the sequence of faces around a vertex. For uniform polyhedra there is only one vertex type and therefore the vertex configuration fully defines the polyhedron.
In geometry, the midsphere or intersphere of a polyhedron is a sphere which is tangent to every edge of the polyhedron. That is to say, it touches any given edge at exactly one point. Not every polyhedron has a midsphere, but for every polyhedron there is a combinatorially equivalent polyhedron, the canonical polyhedron, that does have a midsphere.
In mathematics, a spherical polyhedron or spherical tiling is a tiling of the sphere in which the surface is divided or partitioned by great arcs into bounded regions called spherical polygons. Much of the theory of symmetrical polyhedra is most conveniently derived in this way.
In geometry, the density of a star polyhedron is a generalization of the concept of winding number from two dimensions to higher dimensions, representing the number of windings of the polyhedron around the center of symmetry of the polyhedron. It can be determined by passing a ray from the center to infinity, passing only through the facets of the polytope and not through any lower dimensional features, and counting how many facets it passes through. For polyhedra for which this count does not depend on the choice of the ray, and for which the central point is not itself on any facet, the density is given by this count of crossed facets.
A dual uniform polyhedron is the dual of a uniform polyhedron. Where a uniform polyhedron is vertex-transitive, a dual uniform polyhedron is face-transitive.
In three-dimensional hyperbolic geometry, an ideal polyhedron is a convex polyhedron all of whose vertices are ideal points, points "at infinity" rather than interior to three-dimensional hyperbolic space. It can be defined as the convex hull of a finite set of ideal points. An ideal polyhedron has ideal polygons as its faces, meeting along lines of the hyperbolic space.
Mathematical Models is a book on the construction of physical models of mathematical objects for educational purposes. It was written by Martyn Cundy and A. P. Rollett, and published by the Clarendon Press in 1951, with a second edition in 1961. Tarquin Publications published a third edition in 1981.