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Polyhedral Numbers

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For Dirk Struik

Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science ((BSPS,volume 15))

Abstract

This note contains a simple proof of the following theorem, which was (very nearly) stated by R. Buckminster Fuller (Marks, 1960, p. 35):

When congruent balls are arranged in cubic close-packing so as to fill a tetrahedron, square pyramid, octahedron, cuboctahedron, truncated tetrahedron or truncated octahedron, with n+1 balls along each edge, the total number of peripheral balls is \[bn2\, + \,2,\] \( b{{n}^{2}}{\mkern 1mu} + {\mkern 1mu} 2, \) where b = 2, 3, 4, 10, 14 or 30, respectively.

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Bibliography

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© 1974 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland

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Coxeter, H.S.M. (1974). Polyhedral Numbers. In: Cohen, R.S., Stachel, J.J., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) For Dirk Struik. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2115-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2115-9_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-277-0379-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-010-2115-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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