Properties
The rhombic dodecahedron is a zonohedron. Its polyhedral dual is the cuboctahedron. The long diagonal of each face is exactly √2 times the length of the short diagonal, so that the acute angles on each face measure arccos(1/3), or approximately 70.53°.
Being the dual of an Archimedean polyhedron, the rhombic dodecahedron is face-transitive, meaning the symmetry group of the solid acts transitively on the set of faces. In elementary terms, this means that for any two faces A and B there is a rotation or reflection of the solid that leaves it occupying the same region of space while moving face A to face B.
The rhombic dodecahedron is one of the nine edge-transitive convex polyhedra, the others being the five Platonic solids, the cuboctahedron, the icosidodecahedron and the rhombic triacontahedron.
The rhombic dodecahedron can be used to tessellate three-dimensional space. It can be stacked to fill a space much like hexagons fill a plane.
This tessellation can be seen as the Voronoi tessellation of the face-centered cubic lattice. Some minerals such as garnet form a rhombic dodecahedral crystal habit. Honeybees use the geometry of rhombic dodecahedra to form honeycomb from a tessellation of cells each of which is a hexagonal prism capped with half a rhombic dodecahedron. The rhombic dodecahedron also appears in the unit cells of diamond and diamondoids. In these cases, four vertices are absent, but the chemical bonds lie on the remaining edges.
The graph of rhombic dodecahedron is nonhamiltonian.
Read more about this topic: Rhombic Dodecahedron
Famous quotes containing the word properties:
“The reason why men enter into society, is the preservation of their property; and the end why they choose and authorize a legislative, is, that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society: to limit the power, and moderate the dominion, of every part and member of the society.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)
“A drop of water has the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as of a flute; strength of a host, as well as of a hero.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)