January 19, 2004
Paper Globe
I spent a diverting evening looking round the
polyhedron map website then printing out and making one of their models. They have numerous different polyhedrons with maps ranging from cubes and tetrahedrons to truncated icosahedron, the picture left. The truncated icosahedron was fun to make. It did, however, get tricky towards the end, I could do with long thin delicate fingers instead of the sausage digits supplied. Perhaps the tetrahedron will be easier.
Interestingly, the truncated icosahedron is the same shape as a standard soccer ball and the carbon 60 molecule - buckminsterfullerene. It consists of twelve pentagons, each surrounded hexagons. Sixty vertices, one for each carbon atom in the C60 molecule. Posted by robives at January 19, 2004 06:43 PM