Platonic solids in $\mathbb Z^3$
Abstract
Extending previous results on a characterization of all equilateral triangle in space having vertices with integer coordinates ("in "), we look at the problem of characterizing all regular polyhedra (Platonic Solids) with the same property. To summarize, we show first that there is no regular icosahedron/ dodecahedron in . On the other hand, there is a finite (6 or 12) class of regular tetrahedra in , associated naturally to each nontrivial solution of the Diophantine equation and for every nontrivial integer solution of the equation . Every regular tetrahedron in belongs, up to an integer translation and/or rotation, to one of these classes. We then show that each such tetrahedron can be completed to a cube with integer coordinates. The study of regular octahedra is reduced to the cube case via the duality between the two. This work allows one to basically give a description the orthogonal group in terms of the seven integer parameters satisfying the two relations mentioned above.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0910.1722,
title = {Platonic solids in $\mathbb Z^3$},
author = {Eugen J. Ionascu and Andrei Markov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0910.1722},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
Eight pages with seven figures