Polyhedron

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Polyhedron

Polyhedron is a three dimensional figure made up of sides called

faces, each face being a polygon. A polygon is a two dimensional

figure made up of line segments called edges that are connected two at

a time at their endpoints. In a polyhedron, several polygonal faces

meet at a corner (vertex). When all the edges of the polygon are of

equal length the polygon is called regular. An equilateral triangle

and a square are examples made up of three and four edges respectively.

Polygons whose sides and angles are not of equal measure, are called

irregular. Regular Polyhedra is also known as Platonic Solids. There

are only five platonic solids.

Equilateral triangles

[IMAGE]-Tetrahedron

3 faces at each vertex

-Octahedron

4 faces at each vertex

-Icosahedron

5 faces at each vertex

Squares

-Cube (hexahedron)

3 faces at each vertex

Pentagons

- Dodecahedron

3 faces at each vertex

Here are short explanations of some Polyhedra…

Tetrahedron

This is the simplest of all the polyhedra. It uses the least number of

faces to enclose any three-dimensional space. The polygon that makes

up these faces is also the simplest polygon. Tetrahedron has 4

vertices, 6 edges and 4 faces.

Hexahedron

Hexahedron is the most common polyhedron. A hexahedron is a polyhedron

with six faces. It is often called cube. The thing about the cube

(hexahedron) is that all the other regular polyhedra can be derived

from taking cuts across the cube to form a tetrahedron first, and

accross the tetrahedron to give an octahedron, and so on.It has 8

vertices, 12 edges, and 6 faces.

Octahedron

Octahedron is made from placing two square based pyramids base to

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