The

compound Compound may refer to: Architecture and built environments * Compound (enclosure), a cluster of buildings having a shared purpose, usually inside a fence or wall ** Compound (fortification), a version of the above fortified with defensive struc ...

of 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 ...

is one of the five regular polyhedral compounds. This polyhedron can be seen as either a stellation of the icosahedron or a

. This compound was first described by Edmund Hess in 1876. It can be seen as a

faceting Stella octangula as a faceting of the cube In geometry, faceting (also spelled facetting) is the process of removing parts of a polygon, polyhedron or polytope, without creating any new vertices. New edges of a faceted polyhedron may be cre ...

of a regular dodecahedron.

As a compound

It can also be seen as the

of ten

with full icosahedral symmetry (I_h). It is one of five regular compounds constructed from identical

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 e ...

s. It shares the same

vertex arrangement In geometry, a vertex arrangement is a set of points in space described by their relative positions. They can be described by their use in polytopes. For example, a ''square vertex arrangement'' is understood to mean four points in a plane, equa ...

as 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

compound of five tetrahedra The compound of five tetrahedra is one of the five regular polyhedral compounds. This compound polyhedron is also a stellation of the regular icosahedron. It was first described by Edmund Hess in 1876. It can be seen as a faceting of a regular d ...

represents two chiral halves of this compound (it can therefore be seen as a "compound of two compounds of five tetrahedra"). It can be made from 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 regu ...

by replacing each cube with a

stella octangula The stellated octahedron is the only stellation of the octahedron. It is also called the stella octangula (Latin for "eight-pointed star"), a name given to it by Johannes Kepler in 1609, though it was known to earlier geometers. It was depict ...

on the cube's vertices (which results in a "compound of five compounds of two tetrahedra").

As a stellation

This

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 ...

is a stellation of the icosahedron, and given as Wenninger model index 25.

As a facetting

It is also a

facetting Stella octangula as a faceting of the cube In geometry, faceting (also spelled facetting) is the process of removing parts of a polygon, polyhedron or polytope, without creating any new vertices. New edges of a faceted polyhedron may be cre ...

of the

, as shown at left. Concave

pentagram A pentagram (sometimes known as a pentalpha, pentangle, or star pentagon) is a regular five-pointed star polygon, formed from the diagonal line segments of a convex (or simple, or non-self-intersecting) regular pentagon. Drawing a circle arou ...

s can be seen on the compound where the pentagonal faces of the dodecahedron are positioned.

As a simple polyhedron

If it is treated as a simple non-convex polyhedron without self-intersecting surfaces, it has 180 faces (120 triangles and 60 concave quadrilaterals), 122 vertices (60 with degree 3, 30 with degree 4, 12 with degree 5, and 20 with degree 12), and 300 edges, giving an Euler characteristic of 122-300+180 = +2.

References

* * (1st Edn University of Toronto (1938)) * H.S.M. Coxeter, ''

Regular Polytopes In mathematics, a regular polytope is a polytope whose symmetry group acts transitively on its flags, thus giving it the highest degree of symmetry. All its elements or -faces (for all , where is the dimension of the polytope) — cells, ...

'', (3rd edition, 1973), Dover edition, , 3.6 ''The five regular compounds'', pp.47-50, 6.2 ''Stellating the Platonic solids'', pp.96-104

External links

* *

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

Compounds of 5 and 10 Tetrahedra
by Sándor Kabai,

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 ...