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In geometry, the small stellated dodecahedron is a Kepler-Poinsot polyhedron, named by Arthur Cayley, and with Schläfli symbol {5/2,5}. It is one of four nonconvex regular polyhedra. It is composed of 12 pentagrammic faces, with five pentagrams meeting at each vertex.
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It shares the same vertex arrangement as the convex regular icosahedron. It also shares the same edge arrangement with the great icosahedron.
It is the second of four stellations of the dodecahedron.
If the pentagrammic faces are considered as 5 triangular faces, it shares the same surface topology as the pentakis dodecahedron, but with much taller isosceles triangle faces, with the height of the pentagonal pyramids adjusted so that the five triangles in the pentagram become coplanar.
If we regard it as having 12 pentagrams as faces, with these pentagrams meeting at 30 edges and 12 vertices, we can compute its genus using Euler's formula
and conclude that the small stellated dodecahedron has genus 4. This observation, made by Louis Poinsot, was initially confusing, but Felix Klein showed in 1877 that the small stellated dodecahedron could be seen as a branched covering of the Riemann sphere by a Riemann surface of genus 4, with branch points at the center of each pentagram. In fact this Riemann surface, called Bring's curve, has the greatest number of symmetries of any Riemann surface of genus 4: the symmetric group
In art
Related polyhedra
Its convex hull is the regular convex icosahedron. It also shares its edges with the great icosahedron.
This polyhedron is the truncation of the great dodecahedron:
The truncated small stellated dodecahedron looks like a dodecahedron on the surface, but it has 24 faces: 12 pentagons from the truncated vertices and 12 overlapping (as truncated pentagrams).