At the 2005
Art
and Math Conference, in Boulder, Colorado, many of the participants
worked together to assemble a big beautiful
Zometool
model. This construction is 2 meters in diameter and made from
11540
small plastic parts.
This is a 3D shadow of a uniform four-dimensional
polytope, sometimes known as the
runci-truncated
120-cell, consisting of 120 truncated dodecahedra, 600
cuboctahedra,
1200 triangular prisms, and 720 decagonal prisms. But
you don't have to understand
what that means
in order to appreciate it.
Many people worked together during a
lunch break making modules.
We had to make 75 modules in five
different shapes. Each module is a kind of squished truncated
dodecahedron.
Most of the modules are larger than
a watermelon, but some are
completely flat.
(We didn't actually finish the last
few of the flat ones during the
conference.)
We assembled the modules together with decagonal prisms, starting at
the base.
Adding modules, it grew quite quickly.
We barely stopped for lunch...
The topmost cell was tricky to attach.
A big thank you to everyone who
helped! This shot shows some of the people present at the end.
The group who spent several hours completing it included Helmer
Aslaksen, Doug Dunham, Tomas Garcia-Salgado, Paul Hildebrandt, Chris
Kling, Francisco Lara-Dammer, Kaz Maslanka, Doug McKenna, Tony
Phillips, and Scott Vorthmann.
Thank you to Carla Farsi for arranging the conference events,
and to
Zometool
for loaning the parts for this event.
We started in a rush, and I chose this model to make on the spur of the
moment, so I didn't realize until later that this is the same polytope
that
I made a year earlier as part of
a museum
exhibit in Taiwan.
Photos on this page are by Chris
Kling, Helmer
Aslaksen, and Tomas Garcia-Salgado.
