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The Platonic solids have been known since antiquity. It has been suggested that certain carved stone balls created by the late Neolithic people of Scotland represent these shapes; however, these balls have rounded knobs rather than being polyhedral, the numbers of knobs frequently differed from the numbers of vertices of the Platonic solids, there is no ball whose knobs match the 20 vertices ...
Truncated icosahedron, one of the Archimedean solids illustrated in De quinque corporibus regularibus. The five Platonic solids (the regular tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron) were known to della Francesca through two classical sources: Timaeus, in which Plato theorizes that four of them correspond to the classical elements making up the world (with the fifth, the ...
Tessellations of euclidean and hyperbolic space may also be considered regular polytopes. Note that an 'n'-dimensional polytope actually tessellates a space of one dimension less. For example, the (three-dimensional) platonic solids tessellate the 'two'-dimensional 'surface' of the sphere.
The five Platonic solids have an Euler characteristic of 2. This simply reflects that the surface is a topological 2-sphere, and so is also true, for example, of any polyhedron which is star-shaped with respect to some interior point.
A regular dodecahedron or pentagonal dodecahedron [notes 1] is a dodecahedron composed of regular pentagonal faces, three meeting at each vertex.It is an example of Platonic solids, described as cosmic stellation by Plato in his dialogues, and it was used as part of Solar System proposed by Johannes Kepler.
The Platonic solids, seen here in an illustration from Johannes Kepler's Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596), are an early example of exceptional objects. The symmetries of three-dimensional space can be classified into two infinite families—the cyclic and dihedral symmetries of n-sided polygons—and five exceptional types of symmetry, namely the symmetry groups of the Platonic solids.
Pages in category "Platonic solids" The following 10 pages are in this category, out of 10 total. This list may not reflect recent changes. ...
This fact led these five solids, now called the Platonic solids, to play a prominent role in the philosophy of Plato (and consequently, also influenced later Western Philosophy) who associated each of the four classical elements with a regular solid: earth with the cube, air with the octahedron, water with the icosahedron, and fire with the ...