Deltoidal icositetrahedron


In geometry, a deltoidal icositetrahedron is a Catalan solid. Its dual polyhedron is the rhombicuboctahedron.

Cartesian coordinates

for a suitably sized deltoidal icositetrahedron centered at the origin are:
The long edges of this deltoidal icosahedron have length ≈ 0.765367.

Dimensions

The 24 faces are kites. The short and long edges of each kite are in the ratio 1: ≈ 1:...
If its smallest edges have length a, its surface area and volume are
The kites have three equal acute angles with value and one obtuse angle with value.

Occurrences in nature and culture

The deltoidal icositetrahedron is a crystal habit often formed by the mineral analcime and occasionally garnet. The shape is often called a trapezohedron in mineral contexts, although in solid geometry that name has another meaning.

Orthogonal projections

The deltoidal icositetrahedron has three symmetry positions, all centered on vertices:
Projective
symmetry
Image
Dual
image

Related polyhedra

The great triakis octahedron is a stellation of the deltoidal icositetrahedron.

Dyakis dodecahedron

The deltoidal icositetrahedron is topologically equivalent to a cube whose faces are divided in quadrants. It can also be projected onto a regular octahedron, with kite faces, or more general quadrilaterals with pyritohedral symmetry. In Conway polyhedron notation, they represent an ortho operation to a cube or octahedron.
In crystallography a rotational variation is called a dyakis dodecahedron or diploid.

Related polyhedra and tilings

The deltoidal icositetrahedron is one of a family of duals to the uniform polyhedra related to the cube and regular octahedron.
When projected onto a sphere, it can be seen that the edges make up the edges of an octahedron and cube arranged in their dual positions. It can also be seen that the threefold corners and the fourfold corners can be made to have the same distance to the center. In that case the resulting icositetrahedron will no longer have a rhombicuboctahedron for a dual, since for the rhombicuboctahedron the centers of its squares and its triangles are at different distances from the center.
This polyhedron is topologically related as a part of sequence of deltoidal polyhedra with face figure, and continues as tilings of the hyperbolic plane. These face-transitive figures have reflectional symmetry.