JF Ptak Science Books Post 2516
I've missed this pamphlet for years--tall, slender, no spine title--until this morning, when it came to life. It is the work of Miles C. Hartley, who deconstructed polyhedron for the purpose of reconstructing them in a classroom as "sensory experiments". This was his method of keeping students interested in math, or at least keeping students interested in something that hopefully led to an interest in math. Hartley recognizes that many textbooks will include models for the five regular polyhedron, and stop there, the students "stalemated". Hartley goes on to include 69 models, many of them fairly complicated, in the hope of creating a deeper interest in solid geometry and symmetry.
For example, this is a great rhombicuboctahedron, scooped out of the fourth image below, and which nicely fills a larger sheet of paper for cut-fold-paste:
If I could determine that the book was out of copyright and not just out of print I would just reprint the thing right here--but for now I've included the first 22 diagrams with scans tight enough to allow them to be printed, cropped, enlarged, and printed out again with each design on a 11x8 sheet of paper. Enjoy!
[Source: Hartley, Miles C., Patterns of Polyhedrons. This copy is the first edition of 1941, printed by Edwards Brothers lithography, 27x22cm, 29pp, and which seems to be fairly scarce. The reprints that are available in one form or another seem to all come from the "revised edition" of 1948 and 1951, which is the same size but with 48pp. I've not seen one of these and don't know if the diagrams are just spaced differently or if there are more.]
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