Convex polyhedron in the context of Polyhedral graph

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 congruent), and the same number of faces meet at each vertex. There are only five such polyhedra: a tetrahedron (four faces), a cube (six faces), an octahedron (eight faces), a dodecahedron (twelve faces), and an icosahedron (twenty faces).

Geometers have studied the Platonic solids for thousands of years. They are named for the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who hypothesized in one of his dialogues, the Timaeus, that the classical elements were made of these regular solids.

In geometry, an icosahedron (/ˌaɪkɒsəˈhiːdrən, -kə-, -koʊ-/ or /aɪˌkɒsəˈhiːdrən/) is a polyhedron with 20 faces. The name comes from Ancient Greek εἴκοσι (eíkosi) 'twenty' and ἕδρα (hédra) 'seat'. The plural can be either "icosahedra" (/-drə/) or "icosahedrons".

There are infinitely many non-similar shapes of icosahedra, some of them being more symmetrical than others. The best known is the (convex, non-stellated) regular icosahedron—one of the Platonic solids—whose faces are 20 equilateral triangles.

In geometry, an inscribed planar shape or solid is one that is enclosed by and "fits snugly" inside another geometric shape or solid. To say that "figure F is inscribed in figure G" means precisely the same thing as "figure G is circumscribed about figure F". A circle or ellipse inscribed in a convex polygon (or a sphere or ellipsoid inscribed in a convex polyhedron) is tangent to every side or face of the outer figure (but see Inscribed sphere for semantic variants). A polygon inscribed in a circle, ellipse, or polygon (or a polyhedron inscribed in a sphere, ellipsoid, or polyhedron) has each vertex on the outer figure; if the outer figure is a polygon or polyhedron, there must be a vertex of the inscribed polygon or polyhedron on each side of the outer figure. An inscribed figure is not necessarily unique in orientation; this can easily be seen, for example, when the given outer figure is a circle, in which case a rotation of an inscribed figure gives another inscribed figure that is congruent to the original one.

Familiar examples of inscribed figures include circles inscribed in triangles or regular polygons, and triangles or regular polygons inscribed in circles. A circle inscribed in any polygon is called its incircle, in which case the polygon is said to be a tangential polygon. A polygon inscribed in a circle is said to be a cyclic polygon, and the circle is said to be its circumscribed circle or circumcircle.

In geometry, a Kepler–Poinsot polyhedron is any of four regular star polyhedra.

They may be obtained by stellating the regular convex dodecahedron and icosahedron, and differ from these in having regular pentagrammic faces or vertex figures. They can all be seen as three-dimensional analogues of the pentagram in one way or another.

The regular icosahedron (or simply icosahedron) is a convex polyhedron that can be constructed from pentagonal antiprism by attaching two pentagonal pyramids with regular faces to each of its pentagonal faces, or by putting points onto the cube. The resulting polyhedron has 20 equilateral triangles as its faces, 30 edges, and 12 vertices. It is an example of a Platonic solid and of a deltahedron. The icosahedral graph represents the skeleton of a regular icosahedron.

Many polyhedra and other related figures are constructed from the regular icosahedron, including its 59 stellations. The great dodecahedron, one of the Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra, is constructed by either stellation of the regular dodecahedron or faceting of the icosahedron. Some of the Johnson solids can be constructed by removing the pentagonal pyramids. The regular icosahedron's dual polyhedron is the regular dodecahedron, and their relation has a historical background in the comparison mensuration. It is analogous to a four-dimensional polytope, the 600-cell.

In geometry, a cuboid is a hexahedron with quadrilateral faces, meaning it is a polyhedron with six faces; it has eight vertices and twelve edges. A rectangular cuboid (sometimes also called a "cuboid") has all right angles and equal opposite rectangular faces. Etymologically, "cuboid" means "like a cube", in the sense of a convex solid which can be transformed into a cube (by adjusting the lengths of its edges and the angles between its adjacent faces). A cuboid is a convex polyhedron whose polyhedral graph is the same as that of a cube.

General cuboids have many different types. When all of the rectangular cuboid's edges are equal in length, it results in a cube, with six square faces and adjacent faces meeting at right angles. Along with the rectangular cuboids, parallelepiped is a cuboid with six parallelogram faces. Rhombohedron is a cuboid with six rhombus faces. A square frustum is a frustum with a square base, but the rest of its faces are quadrilaterals; the square frustum is formed by truncating the apex of a square pyramid.In attempting to classify cuboids by their symmetries, Robertson (1983) found that there were at least 22 different cases, "of which only about half are familiar in the shapes of everyday objects".

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 Catalan solid, and the dual polyhedron of the icosidodecahedron. It is a zonohedron and can be seen as an elongated rhombic icosahedron.

The ratio of the long diagonal to the short diagonal of each face is exactly equal to the golden ratio, φ, so that the acute angles on each face measure 2 arctan(⁠1/φ⁠) = arctan(2), or approximately 63.43°. A rhombus so obtained is called a golden rhombus.

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 is dual to the dual polyhedron's circumsphere.

The radius of the sphere inscribed in a polyhedron P is called the inradius of P.

In mathematics, and more specifically in polyhedral combinatorics, a Goldberg polyhedron is a convex polyhedron made from hexagons and pentagons. They were first described in 1937 by Michael Goldberg (1902–1990). They are defined by three properties: each face is either a pentagon or hexagon, exactly three faces meet at each vertex, and they have rotational icosahedral symmetry. They are not necessarily mirror-symmetric; e.g. GP(5,3) and GP(3,5) are enantiomorphs of each other. A Goldberg polyhedron is a dual polyhedron of a geodesic polyhedron.

A consequence of Euler's polyhedron formula is that a Goldberg polyhedron always has exactly 12 pentagonal faces. Icosahedral symmetry ensures that the pentagons are always regular and that there are always 12 of them. If the vertices are not constrained to a sphere, the polyhedron can be constructed with planar equilateral (but not in general equiangular) faces.

In geometry, a Johnson solid, sometimes also known as a Johnson–Zalgaller solid, is a convex polyhedron whose faces are regular polygons. They are sometimes defined to exclude the uniform polyhedra. There are ninety-two solids with such a property: the first solids are the pyramids, cupolas, and a rotunda; some of the solids may be constructed by attaching with those previous solids, whereas others may not.

In geometry, a uniform polyhedron has regular polygons as faces and is vertex-transitive—there is an isometry mapping any vertex onto any other. It follows that all vertices are congruent. Uniform polyhedra may be regular (if also face- and edge-transitive), quasi-regular (if also edge-transitive but not face-transitive), or semi-regular (if neither edge- nor face-transitive). The faces and vertices don't need to be convex, so many of the uniform polyhedra are also star polyhedra.

There are two infinite classes of uniform polyhedra, together with 75 other polyhedra. They are 2 infinite classes of prisms and antiprisms, the convex polyhedrons as in 5 Platonic solids and 13 Archimedean solids—2 quasiregular and 11 semiregular— the non-convex star polyhedra as in 4 Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra and 53 uniform star polyhedra—14 quasiregular and 39 semiregular. There are also many degenerate uniform polyhedra with pairs of edges that coincide, including one found by John Skilling called the great disnub dirhombidodecahedron, Skilling's figure.

In geometry, a prismatoid is a convex polyhedron whose vertices all lie in two parallel planes. Its lateral faces can be trapezoids or triangles. If both planes have the same number of vertices, and the lateral faces are either parallelograms or trapezoids, it is called a prismoid.

Polyhedral combinatorics is a branch of mathematics, within combinatorics and discrete geometry, that studies the problems of counting and describing the faces of convex polyhedra and higher-dimensional convex polytopes.

Research in polyhedral combinatorics falls into two distinct areas. Mathematicians in this area study the combinatorics of polytopes; for instance, they seek inequalities that describe the relations between the numbers of vertices, edges, and faces of higher dimensions in arbitrary polytopes or in certain important subclasses of polytopes, and study other combinatorial properties of polytopes such as their connectivity and diameter (number of steps needed to reach any vertex from any other vertex). Additionally, many computer scientists use the phrase “polyhedral combinatorics” to describe research into precise descriptions of the faces of certain specific polytopes (especially 0-1 polytopes, whose vertices are subsets of a hypercube) arising from integer programming problems.

In geometry, a parallelohedron or Fedorov polyhedron is a convex polyhedron that can be translated without rotations to fill Euclidean space, producing a honeycomb in which all copies of the polyhedron meet face-to-face. Evgraf Fedorov identified the five types of parallelohedron in 1885 in his studies of crystallographic systems. They are the cube, hexagonal prism, rhombic dodecahedron, elongated dodecahedron, and truncated octahedron.

Each parallelohedron is centrally symmetric with symmetric faces, making it a special case of a zonohedron. Each parallelohedron is also a stereohedron, a polyhedron that tiles space so that all tiles are symmetric. The centers of the tiles in a tiling of space by parallelohedra form a Bravais lattice, and every Bravais lattice can be formed in this way. Adjusting the lengths of parallel edges in a parallelohedron, or performing an affine transformation of the parallelohedron, results in another parallelohedron of the same combinatorial type. It is possible to choose this adjustment so that the tiling by parallelohedra is the Voronoi diagram of its Bravais lattice, and so that the resulting parallelohedra become special cases of the plesiohedra.