On monday, March 28, 2005, dozens of students (and a
few faculty) helped me assemble this beautiful mathematical model in
the Stony Brook Student Center Lobby. This large construction is almost
2 meters in diameter and made from over ten thousand
small plastic parts. It is a three-dimensional shadow
of a four-dimensional object sometimes known as the
runci-truncated 600-cell. But
you don't have to understand
what that means
in order to see
how beautiful it is.
We started assembly about 10:00 AM.
We had to make 75 modules in five
different shapes.
Each module is a kind of rhombicosidodecahedron.
Most of the modules are larger than a watermelon, but some are
completely flat.
Volunteers came and went with classes,
but usually there were about fifteen people working.
Then we began to assemble the modules together with pentagonal prisms.
We added the final parts around 2:00, so the total time was under four
hours.
Here is the group present at the end. Thank you everyone who
helped!
It was on display for 2 hours. The 5-fold axis view is most
impressive.
Sadly, we had to dismantle it.
Disassembly and sorting parts took 50 minutes.
Thank you
Zometool
and Dan
Duddy for loaning all the parts for this event.
