![]() In order to get the shapes thin enough for the punch bowl, Professor O’Rourke and I worked to create the Platonic solids using Mathematica. This was Diana’s project, but she used my models of the Platonic solids. One of the reasons we built the Platonic solids was to build a replica of Kepler’s model of the solar system. Models of Platonic Solids, from left to right: cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and tetraehdron. Like the tetrahedron, the octahedron had to be beveled to keep edges from sticking out through each other. The rotations become more difficult to compute when the faces are further removed from the original face. It has twenty faces (again equilateral triangles), each of which must meet at an angle of approximately 138.19°. The icosahedron was complicated because of the sheer number of rotations involved. It was a long process of trial and error, but eventually it worked out. ![]() The angles of the tetrahedron are all acute, which means that the faces stick out through each other if they are not beveled correctly. The tetrahedron (composed of four faces, each of which is an equilateral triangle) proved more challenging. Next came the cube, which was without complications. I then duplicated this shape and rotated the copy so that the faces fit at the correct dihedral angle. I ended up rotating five rectangular prisms and fitting them together into a pentagonal face. As it was my first shape, much of the difficulty was in deciding how to build the shape. The dodecahedron has twelve faces, each of which is a regular pentagon. The different shapes provided different challenges. The five Platonic solids are the cube, the dodecahedron, the icosahedron, the octahedron, and the tetrahedron. I did most of my work in Alias Studio 12, but towards the end of the summer I also used Mathematica to construct the models in a different way. I used the computer to capture renderings and learned to operate the three-dimensional printer (also known as a rapid prototyping machine) to create physical models of all five shapes. This summer I used computer software to design three-dimensional models of all five Platonic solids in Leonardo da Vinci’s solid edge form. SummeResearch Summer Research 2005- Gillian Brunet Working for Joe O'Rourke of the Computer Science Department Week 1 ~ Week 2 ~ Week 3 ~ Week 4 ~ Week 5 ~ Week 6 ~ Week 7
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |