Drawing and constructing polyhedra is a pastime that goes back to the Renaissance and perhaps even earlier times. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), for one, created illustrations of various polyhedra for a 1509 book on the divine proportion by Luca Pacioli (1445–1517).
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These immensely varied, crystal-like shapes, with regular features and flat faces (plane polygons), come in all sorts of configurations. Many people know of the five regular polyhedra: the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. But the realm of polyhedra encompasses all sorts of additional forms: spiky stellated polyhedra, intricate, interlocked shapes, buckyballs and their cousins, and many more.