In geometry, a circumscribed sphere of a polyhedron is a sphere that contains the polyhedron and touches each of the polyhedron's vertices. The word circumsphere is sometimes used to mean the same thing. As in the case of two-dimensional circumscribed circles, the radius of a sphere circumscribed around a polyhedron P is called the circumradius of P, and the center point of this sphere is called the circumcenter of P.
When it exists, a circumscribed sphere need not be the smallest sphere containing the polyhedron; for instance, the tetrahedron formed by a vertex of a cube and its three neighbors has the same circumsphere as the cube itself, but can be contained within a smaller sphere having the three neighboring vertices on its equator. However, the smallest sphere containing a given polyhedron is always the circumsphere of the convex hull of a subset of the vertices of the polyhedron. In De solidorum elementis, René Descartes observed that, for a polyhedron with a circumscribed sphere, all faces have circumscribed circles, the circles where the plane of the face meets the circumscribed sphere. Descartes suggested that this necessary condition for the existence of a circumscribed sphere is sufficient, but it is not true: some bipyramids, for instance, can have circumscribed circles for their faces but still have no circumscribed sphere for the whole polyhedron. However, whenever a simple polyhedron has a circumscribed circle for each of its faces, it also has a circumscribed sphere.
Related concepts
The circumscribed sphere is the three-dimensional analogue of the circumscribed circle. All regular polyhedra have circumscribed spheres, but most irregularpolyhedra do not have one, since in general not all vertices lie on a common sphere. The circumscribed sphere is an example of a bounding sphere, a sphere that contains a given shape. It is possible to define the smallest bounding sphere for any polyhedron, and compute it in linear time. Other spheres defined for some but not all polyhedra include a midsphere, a sphere tangent to all edges of a polyhedron, and an inscribed sphere, a sphere tangent to all faces of a polyhedron. In the regular polyhedra, the inscribed sphere, midsphere, and circumscribed sphere all exist and are concentric. When the circumscribed sphere is the set of infinite limiting points of hyperbolic space, a polyhedron that it circumscribes is known as an ideal polyhedron.
