3 - Platonic solids previous next

Around 360 BC, in the Timaeus, Plato wrote:
To the earth then, which is the most stable of bodies and the most easily modelled of them, may be assigned the form of a cube, and the remaining forms to the other elements — to fire the tetrahedron, to air the octahedron, and to water the icosahedron — according to their degrees of lightness or heaviness or power, or want of power, of penetration.









You can read the Timaeus at Project Gutenberg.

The rotating images of Platonic solids were created by Cyp, who placed them on Wikicommons under a GNU Free Documentation License. You can see them on the Wikipedia article on Platonic solids.