Atiyah and Sutcliffe previous next

But maybe the Greeks were not the first to discover the icosahedron!

In 2003, Michael Atiyah and Paul Sutcliffe wrote:

Although they are termed Platonic solids there is convincing evidence that they were known to the Neolithic people of Scotland at least a thousand years before Plato, as demonstrated by the stone models pictured in Fig. 1 which date from this period and are kept in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Figure 1. Stone models of the cube, tetrahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron and octahedron.
They date from about 2000 BC and are kept in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford















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