10 Apr
2007
10 Apr
'07
7:48 p.m.
Science News' Math Trek has an interesting article this week, by Julie J. Rehmeyer. It's about a unistable object discovered by Gabor Domokos and Peter Varkonyi.
There is a prize offered for a polyhedral solution, but it's $10K/face-count. The authors don't expect to pay much. There's no discussion of the obvious first move, simply taking their rounded solution and using sandpaper to make a lot of tiny flat faces.
I must be missing something. Why doesn't the 19-face polyhedron shown in http://mathworld.wolfram.com/UnistablePolyhedron.html qualify? Jim Propp