Girish Mahajan (Editor)

Jessen's icosahedron

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Jessen's icosahedron

Jessen's icosahedron, sometimes called Jessen's orthogonal icosahedron, is a non-convex polyhedron with the same number of vertices, edges and faces as the regular icosahedron. It was introduced by Børge Jessen in 1967 and has several interesting geometric properties:

  • It is vertex-transitive (or isogonal), meaning that it has symmetries taking any vertex to any other vertex.
  • It has only right dihedral angles.
  • It is (continuously) rigid but not infinitesimally rigid. That is, in less formal language, it is a shaky polyhedron.
  • As with the simpler Schönhardt polyhedron, its interior cannot be triangulated into tetrahedra without adding new vertices.
  • It is scissors-congruent to a cube, meaning that it can be sliced into smaller polyhedral pieces that can be rearranged to form a solid cube.
  • Although a shape resembling Jessen's icosahedron can be formed by keeping the vertices of a regular icosahedron in their original positions and replacing certain pairs of equilateral-triangle faces by pairs of isosceles triangles, the resulting polyhedron does not have right-angled dihedrals. The vertices of Jessen's icosahedron are perturbed from these positions in order to give all the dihedrals right angles.

    References

    Jessen's icosahedron Wikipedia