geometry Geometry (; ) is, with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. It is concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is ...

, a rhombic enneacontahedron (plural: rhombic enneacontahedra) is a

polyhedron In geometry, a polyhedron (plural polyhedra or polyhedrons; ) is a three-dimensional shape with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices. A convex polyhedron is the convex hull of finitely many points, not all on ...

composed of 90 rhombic faces; with three, five, or six rhombi meeting at each vertex. It has 60 broad rhombi and 30 slim. The rhombic enneacontahedron is a

zonohedron In geometry, a zonohedron is a convex polyhedron that is centrally symmetric, every face of which is a polygon that is centrally symmetric (a zonogon). Any zonohedron may equivalently be described as the Minkowski sum of a set of line segments i ...

with a superficial resemblance to the

rhombic triacontahedron In geometry, the rhombic triacontahedron, sometimes simply called the triacontahedron as it is the most common thirty-faced polyhedron, is a convex polyhedron with 30 rhombic faces. It has 60 edges and 32 vertices of two types. It is a Ca ...

Construction

It can also be seen as a nonuniform

truncated icosahedron In geometry, the truncated icosahedron is an Archimedean solid, one of 13 convex isogonal nonprismatic solids whose 32 faces are two or more types of regular polygons. It is the only one of these shapes that does not contain triangles or squares. ...

with pyramids augmented to the pentagonal and hexagonal faces with heights adjusted until the

dihedral angle A dihedral angle is the angle between two intersecting planes or half-planes. In chemistry, it is the clockwise angle between half-planes through two sets of three atoms, having two atoms in common. In solid geometry, it is defined as the un ...

s are zero, and the two pyramid type side edges are equal length. This construction is expressed in the

Conway polyhedron notation In geometry, Conway polyhedron notation, invented by John Horton Conway and promoted by George W. Hart, is used to describe polyhedra based on a seed polyhedron modified by various prefix operations. Conway and Hart extended the idea of using o ...

''jtI'' with join operator ''j''. Without the equal edge constraint, the wide rhombi are

kites A kite is a tethered heavier-than-air or lighter-than-air craft with wing surfaces that react against the air to create lift and drag forces. A kite consists of wings, tethers and anchors. Kites often have a bridle and tail to guide the face ...

if limited only by the

icosahedral symmetry In mathematics, and especially in geometry, an object has icosahedral symmetry if it has the same symmetries as a regular icosahedron. Examples of other polyhedra with icosahedral symmetry include the regular dodecahedron (the dual polyhedr ...

The sixty broad rhombic faces in the rhombic enneacontahedron are identical to those in the

rhombic dodecahedron In geometry, the rhombic dodecahedron is a convex polyhedron with 12 congruent rhombic faces. It has 24 edges, and 14 vertices of 2 types. It is a Catalan solid, and the dual polyhedron of the cuboctahedron. Properties The rhombic dodecahed ...

, with diagonals in a ratio of 1 to the square root of 2. The face angles of these rhombi are approximately 70.528° and 109.471°. The thirty slim rhombic faces have face vertex angles of 41.810° and 138.189°; the diagonals are in ratio of 1 to φ². It is also called a rhombic enenicontahedron in

Lloyd Kahn Lloyd Kahn (born April 28, 1935) is an American publisher, editor, author, photographer, carpenter, and self-taught architect. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, Inc., and is the former Shelter editor of the ''Whole Earth ...

's ''Domebook 2''.

Close-packing density

The optimal packing fraction of rhombic enneacontahedra is given by :

\eta = 16 - \frac \approx 0.7947377530014315

. It was noticed that this optimal value is obtained in a

Bravais lattice In geometry and crystallography, a Bravais lattice, named after , is an infinite array of discrete points generated by a set of discrete translation operations described in three dimensional space by : \mathbf = n_1 \mathbf_1 + n_2 \mathbf_2 + n ...

by . Since the rhombic enneacontahedron is contained in a

whose

inscribed sphere 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 i ...

is identical to its own inscribed sphere, the value of the optimal packing fraction is a corollary of the

Kepler conjecture The Kepler conjecture, named after the 17th-century mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, is a mathematical theorem about sphere packing in three-dimensional Euclidean space. It states that no arrangement of equally sized spheres filling s ...

: it can be achieved by putting a rhombicuboctahedron in each cell of the

rhombic dodecahedral honeycomb The rhombic dodecahedral honeycomb (also dodecahedrille) is a space-filling tessellation (or honeycomb) in Euclidean 3-space. It is the Voronoi diagram of the face-centered cubic sphere-packing, which has the densest possible packing of equal s ...

, and it cannot be surpassed, since otherwise the optimal packing density of spheres could be surpassed by putting a sphere in each rhombicuboctahedron of the hypothetical packing which surpasses it.

References

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VRML VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language, pronounced ''vermal'' or by its initials, originally—before 1995—known as the Virtual Reality Markup Language) is a standard file format for representing 3-dimensional (3D) interactive vector graph ...

model: George Hart

George Hart's Conway Generator
Try Conway polyhedron notation, dakD
Domebook2 by Kahn, Lloyd (Editor); Easton, Bob; Calthorpe, Peter; et al., Pacific Domes, Los Gatos, CA (1971), page 102
* * *

External links

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* George Hart
A Color-Matching Dissection of the Rhombic Enneacontahedron

model {{Polyhedra Zonohedra