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One thing this allows us to do is to understand how this culture wrote its numbers (Chinese Bamboo Counting Rods). How did the Chinese of the 13th century write 15? 28? 30?
"A regular polygon is a polygon which is equiangular (all angles are equal in measure) and equilateral (all sides have the same length). Regular polygons may be convex or star."
A Platonic solid is a solid for which
Let's try making some using magnetic kits ("geomags").
By the way, you'll have to put these kits away. Please be careful as you take them apart, and play with them! I need them back neatly in their boxes.
"The six spheres each corresponded to one of the planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). The solids were ordered with the innermost being the octahedron, followed by the icosahedron, dodecahedron, tetrahedron, and finally the cube. In this way the structure of the solar system and the distance relationships between the planets was dictated by the Platonic solids."
The Five Convex Regular Polyhedra (Platonic solids) -- thanks Wikipedia! | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Tetrahedron | Hexahedron or Cube |
Octahedron | Dodecahedron | Icosahedron |
# of Vertices | Edges | Faces | faces at each vertex | sides at each face | |
Tetrahedron | |||||
Cube | |||||
Octahedron | |||||
Dodecahedron | |||||
Icosahedron |
What conclusions can we draw from this data? Is there a pattern? (Of course there is!:)