Esses

A month or so ago I was fooling around on Great Stella, faceting stellations of the rhombic triacontahedron, when I came across this cool shape. It is made up of 30 "S" shaped pieces (or backwards S's, depending on whether you make it left- or right-handed), and they interweave in very interesting ways. The really neat thing about this model is that even though the pieces interweave among eachother quite a bit, they don't actually touch except at the twelve points of the model. Also, each point is not directly connected to any of the points directly next to or across from it; only to points exactly two points away. This was my first "open-faced" model; in other words, it is made up of strips of paper that don't actually have any thickness.

Unfortunately, a few days after building this model I found two other designs similar to it. The first is by Robert Webb, who created the Great Stella program that I like so much. His model is topologically the same, though he made the peices a lot thicker. And the second similar design is the sculpture "Compass Points" by George Hart (the "inside" structure of this model is the same basic shape as mine). Well, it was still fun to build something that I at least thought I had discovered.

Inspired by this model, I have already built two more "open-faced" models. One is a direct copy of a model by George Hart, and the other is my own design (and this time it really is my own). As soon as I can get Sam to photograph them I'll post on them.