Dodecahedron in the context of "Platonic solids"

Hippasus of Metapontum (/ˈhɪpəsəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἵππασος ὁ Μεταποντῖνος, Híppasos; c. 530 – c. 450 BC) was a Greek philosopher and early follower of Pythagoras. Little is known about his life or his beliefs, but he is sometimes credited with the discovery of the existence of irrational numbers. The discovery of irrational numbers is said to have been shocking to the Pythagoreans, and Hippasus is supposed to have drowned at sea, apparently as a punishment from the gods for divulging this and crediting it to himself instead of Pythagoras, which was the norm in Pythagorean society. The few ancient sources who describe this story, however, either do not mention Hippasus by name (e.g., Pappus) or alternatively tell that Hippasus drowned because he revealed how to construct a dodecahedron inside a sphere. The discovery of irrationality is not specifically ascribed to Hippasus by any ancient writer.

In geometry, the Schläfli symbol is a notation of the form ${\displaystyle \{p,q,r,...\}}$ that defines regular polytopes and tessellations.

The Schläfli symbol is named after the 19th-century Swiss mathematician Ludwig Schläfli, who generalized Euclidean geometry to more than three dimensions and discovered all their convex regular polytopes, including the six that occur in four dimensions.

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.

In the mathematical field of graph theory, a Hamiltonian path (or traceable path) is a path in an undirected or directed graph that visits each vertex exactly once. A Hamiltonian cycle (or Hamiltonian circuit) is a cycle that visits each vertex exactly once. A Hamiltonian path that starts and ends at adjacent vertices can be completed by adding one more edge to form a Hamiltonian cycle, and removing any edge from a Hamiltonian cycle produces a Hamiltonian path. The computational problems of determining whether such paths and cycles exist in graphs are NP-complete; see Hamiltonian path problem for details.

Hamiltonian paths and cycles are named after William Rowan Hamilton, who invented the icosian game, now also known as Hamilton's puzzle, which involves finding a Hamiltonian cycle in the edge graph of the dodecahedron. Hamilton solved this problem using the icosian calculus, an algebraic structure based on roots of unity with many similarities to the quaternions (also invented by Hamilton). This solution does not generalize to arbitrary graphs.

A regular dodecahedron or pentagonal dodecahedron is a dodecahedron (a polyhedron with 12 faces) composed of regular pentagonal faces, three meeting at each vertex. It is one of the Platonic solids, described in Plato's dialogues as the shape of the universe itself. Johannes Kepler used the dodecahedron in his 1596 model of the Solar System. However, the dodecahedron and other Platonic solids had already been described by other philosophers since antiquity.

The regular dodecahedron is a truncated trapezohedron because it is the result of truncating axial vertices of a pentagonal trapezohedron. It is also a Goldberg polyhedron because it is the initial polyhedron to construct new polyhedra by the process of chamfering. It has a relation with other Platonic solids, one of them is the regular icosahedron as its dual polyhedron. Other new polyhedra can be constructed by using a regular dodecahedron.

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 ⁠${\displaystyle a}$⁠ and ⁠${\displaystyle b}$⁠ with ⁠${\displaystyle a>b>0}$⁠, ⁠${\displaystyle a}$⁠ is in a golden ratio to ⁠${\displaystyle b}$⁠ if $${\displaystyle {\frac {a+b}{a}}={\frac {a}{b}}=\varphi ,}$$ where the Greek letter phi (⁠${\displaystyle \varphi }$⁠ or ⁠${\displaystyle \phi }$⁠) denotes the golden ratio. The constant ⁠${\displaystyle \varphi }$⁠ satisfies the quadratic equation ⁠${\displaystyle \textstyle \varphi ^{2}=\varphi +1}$⁠ and is an irrational number with a value of${\displaystyle \varphi ={\frac {1+{\sqrt {5}}}{2}}={}}$1.618033988749....The golden ratio was called the extreme and mean ratio by Euclid, and the divine proportion by Luca Pacioli; it also goes by other names.

Mathematicians have studied the golden ratio's properties since antiquity. It is the ratio of a regular pentagon's diagonal to its side and thus appears in the construction of the dodecahedron and icosahedron. A golden rectangle—that is, a rectangle with an aspect ratio of ⁠${\displaystyle \varphi }$⁠—may be cut into a square and a smaller rectangle with the same aspect ratio. The golden ratio has been used to analyze the proportions of natural objects and artificial systems such as financial markets, in some cases based on dubious fits to data. The golden ratio appears in some patterns in nature, including the spiral arrangement of leaves and other parts of vegetation.

Lists of shapes cover different types of geometric shape and related topics. They include mathematics topics and other lists of shapes, such as shapes used by drawing or teaching tools.