Friday, March 9th, 2007 - 1:50 AM

Platonic Solids

A friend of mine, Thom Boyer, recently told me (and a few other people) about platonic solids — three dimensional shapes whose vertices all have the same number of adjacent faces. Plato theorized that these were the building blocks of the universe.

Thom went to a game store and bought a pound of dice (I had no idea they sold them by the pound). He brought them to lunch and shared. I found many dice I really liked. There were only enough for one complete set of platonic solids for each of us, though. This is the set I chose:

Platonic Solids

I find it interesting that with the pieces in ascending order (by number of adjacent faces) with ascending numbers on top oriented so they can be read right-side-up from the front, the numbers in front are in descending order, ending on the right with a vertex representing zero. I suspect that’s more than coincidence.