Archimedean Solids · 3D
Truncated Icosahedron
The buckyball · 5.6.6
Slice every corner off an icosahedron a third of the way along each edge: twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons, the pattern of a football and of the carbon-60 molecule.
- Vertices
- 60
- Edges
- 90
- Faces
- 12 ⬟ + 20 ⬢
Turn it in your hands, strike it to hear the chord of its edges, slice it with a plane.
Facts
- Every vertex joins one pentagon and two hexagons (5.6.6).
- Carbon-60, buckminsterfullerene, has an atom at each of its 60 corners (Nobel Prize 1996).
- Its twelve pentagons sit exactly where the icosahedron’s corners were.
- Any closed surface of pentagons and hexagons with three at each corner needs exactly twelve pentagons.
History and meaning
Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci drew it in the Renaissance. The C60 molecule was named after Buckminster Fuller because it resembles his geodesic domes.
Across the dimensions
- Dual The pentakis dodecahedron, which the app draws inside it.
Learn it step by step
- Journey The Archimedean FamilyStep 11: The football
