Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Something New

Platonic solids, Archimedean solids, Kepler solids, we haven't found a new class of solids for 400 years, until now with the naming of Goldberg polyhedra. Conceptually, you take a regular solid and blow it up like a bouncy castle ride, bowing out the planes. Fill in those bulged out planes with polyhedrons and you get what has been called Goldberg polyhedra since about 1937. But apparently while that satisfied graph theorist Goldberg back in the day, the polyhedrons themselves weren't flat and thus weren't satisfying to Stan Schein who figured out how to make the polyhedrons flat. The only unoriginal thing about it is that he wants to give them the same name as the 1930s discovered shapes, Goldberg polyhedra. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.

Nobody knows for sure how this will all play out but it's nice to see in a very geeky way.

HT: Instapundit

No comments:

Post a Comment