Regular dodecahedron | |
---|---|
Type | Platonic solid, Truncated trapezohedron, Goldberg polyhedron |
Faces | 12 regular pentagons |
Edges | 30 |
Vertices | 20 |
Symmetry group | icosahedral symmetry |
Dihedral angle (degrees) | 116.565° |
Properties | convex, regular |
Net | |
A regular dodecahedron or pentagonal dodecahedron is a dodecahedron composed of regular pentagonal faces, three meeting at each vertex. It is an example of Platonic solids, described as cosmic stellation by Plato in his dialogues, and it was used as part of Solar System proposed by Johannes Kepler. However, the regular dodecahedron, including the other Platonic solids, has already been described by other philosophers since antiquity.
The regular dodecahedron is the family of truncated trapezohedron because it is the result of truncating axial vertices of a pentagonal trapezohedron. It is also a Goldberg polyhedron because it is the initial polyhedron to construct new polyhedrons by the process of chamfering. It has a relation with other Platonic solids, one of them is the regular icosahedron as its dual polyhedron. Other new polyhedrons can be constructed by using regular dodecahedron.
The regular dodecahedron's metric properties and construction are associated with the golden ratio. The regular dodecahedron can be found in many popular cultures: Roman dodecahedron, the children's story, toys, and painting arts. It can also be found in nature and supramolecules, as well as the shape of the universe. The skeleton of a regular dodecahedron can be represented as the graph called the dodecahedral graph, a Platonic graph. Its property of the Hamiltonian, a path visits all of its vertices exactly once, can be found in a toy called icosian game.