The Pavilion of Polyhedreality

By George W. Hart

I welcome you to peek into my personal pavilion of practical polyhedra. All images are copyright by George W. Hart.

This figure shows me and a tensegrity structure made from coffee stirrers and dacron thread. No two sticks actually touch each other.

Note: For your maximal synesthetic enjoyment, I have chosen short musical selections to go with each picture. If your web viewer is set up to play MIDI music files, just click on any of the red notes before selecting a picture, and you can listen to a J.S. Bach piece as background music while each image is transferring.

The following images are available at the moment:

The above figures were each ray traced with POV-ray, using data files produced by a polyhedral construction program I wrote which creates a wide variety of objects with icosadodecahedral symmetry.  The program is described in this paper.

--- Virtual Reality Polyhedra ---

To learn more than you ever wanted to know about polyhedra, you will want to visit my Encyclopedia of Polyhedra. It is intended as a museum of objects, a reference work, and a tutorial of sorts, all dedicated to the serene, timeless beauty of polyhedra and their interrelationships. Over 1000 polyhedra are on display here --- from the familiar to the never-before-seen --- far more than have ever been assembled or collected anywhere. All are truly three-dimensional, meaning you can rotate them and move them around on your computer screen. I plan to complete and publish the Encyclopedia someday as a combination book and CD ROM. In the meantime, you are welcome to take a look as I write each new section.


Other Sites...

Here are a few other web pages related to polyhedral and/or geodesic stuff: Here are some interesting and/or popular illustrated references on polyhedra. For a substantial annotated bibliography, see the annotated bibliography of references in Virtual Polyhedra. In addition, though it is not directly related to polyhedra, if you are interested in applied mathematics and linear algebra, you will of course want to check out my book, Multidimensional Analysis

Comments by email to george@georgehart.com are welcome. 


And for those of you who are wondering: Yes, "Polyhedreality" is a hapax legomenon.