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 c ...

, the rhombic triacontahedron, sometimes simply called the triacontahedron as it is the most common thirty-faced

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 th ...

, is a

convex polyhedron A convex polytope is a special case of a polytope, having the additional property that it is also a convex set contained in the n-dimensional Euclidean space \mathbb^n. Most texts. use the term "polytope" for a bounded convex polytope, and the wo ...

with 30 rhombic

faces The face is the front of an animal's head that features the eyes, nose and mouth, and through which animals express many of their emotions. The face is crucial for human identity, and damage such as scarring or developmental deformities may affe ...

. It has 60 edges and 32 vertices of two types. It is a

Catalan solid In mathematics, a Catalan solid, or Archimedean dual, is a dual polyhedron to an Archimedean solid. There are 13 Catalan solids. They are named for the Belgian mathematician Eugène Catalan, who first described them in 1865. The Catalan sol ...

, and the

dual polyhedron In geometry, every polyhedron is associated with a second dual structure, where the vertices of one correspond to the faces of the other, and the edges between pairs of vertices of one correspond to the edges between pairs of faces of the other. ...

of the

icosidodecahedron In geometry, an icosidodecahedron is a polyhedron with twenty (''icosi'') triangular faces and twelve (''dodeca'') pentagonal faces. An icosidodecahedron has 30 identical vertices, with two triangles and two pentagons meeting at each, and 60 id ...

. It 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 in ...

The ratio of the long diagonal to the short diagonal of each face is exactly equal to the

golden ratio In mathematics, two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. Expressed algebraically, for quantities a and b with a > b > 0, where the Greek letter phi ( ...

, , so that the acute angles on each face measure or approximately 63.43°. A rhombus so obtained is called a ''

golden rhombus In geometry, a golden rhombus is a rhombus whose diagonals are in the golden ratio: : = \varphi = \approx 1.618~034 Equivalently, it is the Varignon parallelogram formed from the edge midpoints of a golden rectangle. Rhombi with this shape form ...

''. Being the dual of an

Archimedean solid In geometry, an Archimedean solid is one of the 13 solids first enumerated by Archimedes. They are the convex uniform polyhedra composed of regular polygons meeting in identical vertices, excluding the five Platonic solids (which are composed ...

, the rhombic triacontahedron is ''

face-transitive In geometry, a tessellation of dimension (a plane tiling) or higher, or a polytope of dimension (a polyhedron) or higher, is isohedral or face-transitive if all its faces are the same. More specifically, all faces must be not merely congruent ...

'', meaning the

symmetry group In group theory, the symmetry group of a geometric object is the group of all transformations under which the object is invariant, endowed with the group operation of composition. Such a transformation is an invertible mapping of the ambient ...

of the solid acts transitively on the set of faces. This means that for any two faces, and , there is a

rotation Rotation, or spin, is the circular movement of an object around a '' central axis''. A two-dimensional rotating object has only one possible central axis and can rotate in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. A three-dimensional ...

reflection Reflection or reflexion may refer to: Science and technology * Reflection (physics), a common wave phenomenon ** Specular reflection, reflection from a smooth surface *** Mirror image, a reflection in a mirror or in water ** Signal reflection, in ...

of the solid that leaves it occupying the same region of space while moving face to face . The rhombic triacontahedron is somewhat special in being one of the nine

edge-transitive In geometry, a polytope (for example, a polygon or a polyhedron) or a tiling is isotoxal () or edge-transitive if its symmetries act transitively on its edges. Informally, this means that there is only one type of edge to the object: given two ...

convex polyhedra, the others being the five

Platonic solid In geometry, a Platonic solid is a convex, regular polyhedron in three-dimensional Euclidean space. Being a regular polyhedron means that the faces are congruent (identical in shape and size) regular polygons (all angles congruent and all edges c ...

s, the

cuboctahedron A cuboctahedron is a polyhedron with 8 triangular faces and 6 square faces. A cuboctahedron has 12 identical vertices, with 2 triangles and 2 squares meeting at each, and 24 identical edges, each separating a triangle from a square. As such, it ...

, the

, and 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 dodecahedro ...

. The rhombic triacontahedron is also interesting in that its vertices include the arrangement of four Platonic solids. It contains ten

tetrahedra In geometry, a tetrahedron (plural: tetrahedra or tetrahedrons), also known as a triangular pyramid, is a polyhedron composed of four triangular faces, six straight edges, and four vertex corners. The tetrahedron is the simplest of all the o ...

, five

cube In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. Viewed from a corner it is a hexagon and its net is usually depicted as a cross. The cube is the only r ...

s, an

icosahedron In geometry, an icosahedron ( or ) is a polyhedron with 20 faces. The name comes and . The plural can be either "icosahedra" () or "icosahedrons". There are infinitely many non- similar shapes of icosahedra, some of them being more symmetrica ...

and a

dodecahedron In geometry, a dodecahedron (Greek , from ''dōdeka'' "twelve" + ''hédra'' "base", "seat" or "face") or duodecahedron is any polyhedron with twelve flat faces. The most familiar dodecahedron is the regular dodecahedron with regular pentagon ...

. The centers of the faces contain five

octahedra In geometry, an octahedron (plural: octahedra, octahedrons) is a polyhedron with eight faces. The term is most commonly used to refer to the regular octahedron, a Platonic solid composed of eight equilateral triangles, four of which meet a ...

. It can be made from a

truncated octahedron In geometry, the truncated octahedron is the Archimedean solid that arises from a regular octahedron by removing six pyramids, one at each of the octahedron's vertices. The truncated octahedron has 14 faces (8 regular hexagon, hexagons and 6 Squa ...

by dividing the hexagonal faces into 3 rhombi: Rhombic triacontahedron in truncated octahedron

Cartesian coordinates

Let

\phi

be the

. The 12 points given by

(0, \pm 1, \pm \phi)

and cyclic permutations of these coordinates are the vertices of a

regular icosahedron In geometry, a regular icosahedron ( or ) is a convex polyhedron with 20 faces, 30 edges and 12 vertices. It is one of the five Platonic solids, and the one with the most faces. It has five equilateral triangular faces meeting at each vertex. It ...

. Its dual

regular dodecahedron A regular dodecahedron or pentagonal dodecahedron is a dodecahedron that is regular, which is composed of 12 regular pentagonal faces, three meeting at each vertex. It is one of the five Platonic solids. It has 12 faces, 20 vertices, 30 edges ...

, whose edges intersect those of the icosahedron at right angles, has as vertices the 8 points

(\pm 1, \pm 1, \pm 1)

together with the 12 points

(0, \pm\phi, \pm 1/\phi)

and cyclic permutations of these coordinates. All 32 points together are the vertices of a rhombic triacontahedron centered at the origin. The length of its edges is

\sqrt\approx 1.175\,570\,504\,58

. Its faces have diagonals with lengths

2

and

2/\phi

Dimensions

If the edge length of a rhombic triacontahedron is ''a'', surface area, volume, the

radius In classical geometry, a radius ( : radii) of a circle or sphere is any of the line segments from its center to its perimeter, and in more modern usage, it is also their length. The name comes from the latin ''radius'', meaning ray but also the ...

of an

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 ...

(

tangent In geometry, the tangent line (or simply tangent) to a plane curve at a given point is the straight line that "just touches" the curve at that point. Leibniz defined it as the line through a pair of infinitely close points on the curve. More ...

to each of the rhombic triacontahedron's faces) and midradius, which touches the middle of each edge are: :

\begin
S &= 12\sqrt\,a^2 &&\approx 26.8328 a^2 \\
V &= 4\sqrt\,a^3 &&\approx 12.3107 a^3 \\
r_\mathrm &= \frac\,a = \sqrt\,a &&\approx 1.37638 a \\
r_\mathrm &= \left(1+\frac\right)\,a &&\approx 1.44721 a
\end

where ''φ'' is the

. The

insphere 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 tangent to the faces at their face centroids. Short diagonals belong only to the edges of the inscribed regular dodecahedron, while long diagonals are included only in edges of the inscribed icosahedron.

Dissection

The rhombic triacontahedron can be dissected into 20 golden rhombohedra: 10 acute ones and 10 obtuse ones.

Orthogonal projections

The rhombic triacontahedron has four symmetry positions, two centered on vertices, one mid-face, and one mid-edge. Embedded in projection "10" are the "fat" rhombus and "skinny" rhombus which tile together to produce the non-periodic tessellation often referred to as

Penrose tiling A Penrose tiling is an example of an aperiodic tiling. Here, a ''tiling'' is a covering of the plane by non-overlapping polygons or other shapes, and ''aperiodic'' means that shifting any tiling with these shapes by any finite distance, without ...

Stellations

Construction of Rhombic hexecontahedron from Rhombic Triacontahedron

The rhombic triacontahedron has 227 fully supported stellations. Another stellation of the Rhombic triacontahedron is the

compound of five cubes The compound of five cubes is one of the five regular polyhedral compounds. It was first described by Edmund Hess in 1876. It is one of five regular compounds, and dual to the compound of five octahedra. It can be seen as a faceting of a regula ...

. The total number of stellations of the rhombic triacontahedron is 358,833,097.

Related polyhedra

This polyhedron is a part of a sequence of rhombic polyhedra and tilings with 'n'',3

Coxeter group In mathematics, a Coxeter group, named after H. S. M. Coxeter, is an abstract group that admits a formal description in terms of reflections (or kaleidoscopic mirrors). Indeed, the finite Coxeter groups are precisely the finite Euclidean refl ...

symmetry. The cube can be seen as a rhombic hexahedron where the rhombi are also rectangles. File:Spherical rhombic triacontahedron.png, Spherical rhombic triacontahedron File:Rhombic tricontahedron cube tetrahedron.png, A rhombic triacontahedron with an inscribed tetrahedron (red) and cube (yellow).
(Click here for rotating model) File:Rhombic tricontahedron icosahedron dodecahedron.png, A rhombic triacontahedron with an inscribed dodecahedron (blue) and icosahedron (purple).
(Click here for rotating model) File:StellaTruncRhombicTriaconta.png, Fully truncated rhombic triacontahedron

6-cube

The rhombic triacontahedron forms a 32 vertex

convex hull In geometry, the convex hull or convex envelope or convex closure of a shape is the smallest convex set that contains it. The convex hull may be defined either as the intersection of all convex sets containing a given subset of a Euclidean space ...

of one projection of a

6-cube In geometry, a 6-cube is a six-dimensional hypercube with 64 vertices, 192 edges, 240 square faces, 160 cubic cells, 60 tesseract 4-faces, and 12 5-cube 5-faces. It has Schläfli symbol , being composed of 3 5-cubes around each 4-face. It ...

to three dimensions.

Uses

Danish designer Holger Strøm used the rhombic triacontahedron as a basis for the design of his buildable lamp IQ-light (IQ for "Interlocking Quadrilaterals"). Rhombic_triacontahedron_box

Woodworker Jane Kostick builds boxes in the shape of a rhombic triacontahedron. The simple construction is based on the less than obvious relationship between the rhombic triacontahedron and the cube. Roger von Oech's "Ball of Whacks" comes in the shape of a rhombic triacontahedron. The rhombic triacontahedron is used as the " d30" thirty-sided die, sometimes useful in some

roleplaying Role-playing or roleplaying is the changing of one's behaviour to assume a role, either unconsciously to fill a social role, or consciously to act out an adopted role. While the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' offers a definition of role-playing as ...

games or other places. Christopher Bird, co-author of The Secret Life of Plants wrote an article for New Age Journal in May, 1975, popularizing the dual icosahedron and dodecahedron as "the crystalline structure of the Earth," a model of the "Earth (telluric) energy Grid." The EarthStar Globe by Bill Becker and Bethe A. Hagens purports to show "the natural geometry of the Earth, and the geometric relationship between sacred places such as the Great Pyramid, the Bermuda Triangle, and Easter Island." It is printed as a rhombic triacontahedron, on 30 diamonds, and folds up into a globe.

References

* (Section 3-9) * (The thirteen semiregular convex polyhedra and their duals, p. 22, Rhombic triacontahedron) * ''The Symmetries of Things'' 2008, John H. Conway, Heidi Burgiel, Chaim Goodman-Strass,

(Chapter 21, Naming the Archimedean and Catalan polyhedra and tilings, p. 285, Rhombic triacontahedron )

The Wolfram Demonstrations Project The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an organized, open-source collection of small (or medium-size) interactive programs called Demonstrations, which are meant to visually and interactively represent ideas from a range of fields. It is hos ...

A viper drawn on a rhombic triacontahedron
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