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Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications

Product ID: Geometers Corner
Supplementary Print
High School

A Geometrical Sculpture Inspires a Geometrical Construction

Author: Jon Choate


While doing my Holiday shopping at the Derby Street Mall. I came across the polyhedral sculpture shown in Figure 1a. Examining it carefully I saw that it had 12 Pentagonal pyramids sticking out from a dodecahedral core. I suspected it was a transformed Kepler‑Poinsot Regular non‑Convex Polyhedra known as a Small Stellated Dodecahedron shown in Figure 1b. This fascinated me so this Geometer’s Corner column will be about how to use GeoGebra to build both a Small Stellated Dodecahedron and the Derby Street Structure. Much of what I am going to describe I got from the article The Four Regular Non‑Convex Polyhedra which can be found at:

https://cage.ugent.be/~hs/polyhedra/keplerpoinsot.html

The Small Stellated Dodecahedron is regular but its faces are not regular polygons but rather are Pentagrams.

©2024 by COMAP, Inc.
Consortium 126
2 pages

Mathematics Topics:

Geometry , 3D Geometry

Application Areas:

Architecture & Design , Arts & Music , Sculpture

Prerequisites:

Basic three dimernsional geometry

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