Truncated icosahedron
Although I play football almost every Saturday night, and have played it on and off throughout my life, I’ve never put much thought into the make-up of the ball. Many may think this surprising.
Well, I’ve been doing some research, and apparently, the ball is made from a truncated icosahedron, an Archimedean solid consisting of twelve pentagons (generally white) and 20 hexagons (black). Both the Archimedean solid (of which there are 13) and the Platonic solid (of which there are five) are convex polyhedra made up of regular polygons, but the Platonic solid is more pure in that it has the same number of faces meeting at each of its vertices – the cube, the tetrahedron etc. This criterion is waived for Archimedean solids.
It’s quite an interesting field, and I may pop along to MIT OpenCourseWare to see whether there’s anything about it. I recommend this site to anyone who’s interested in learning anything academic, btw.
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