Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

Published in

National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1(119), 2022

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2110345118

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Symmetric tangled Platonic polyhedra

Journal article published in 2022 by Stephen T. Hyde ORCID, Myfanwy E. Evans ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Significance Tangled tetrahedra, octahedra, cubes, icosahedra, and dodecahedra are generalizations of classical—untangled—Platonic polyhedra. Like the Platonic polyhedra, all vertices, edges, and faces are symmetrically equivalent. However, the edges of tangled polyhedra are curvilinear, or kinked, to allow entanglement, much like warps and wefts in woven fabrics. We construct the most symmetric entanglements of these polyhedra via assemblies of multistrand helices wound around edges of the conventional polyhedra; they are all necessarily chiral. The construction gives self-entangled chiral polyhedra and compound polyhedra containing catenated multiple tetrahedra or “generalized θ -polyhedra.” An unlimited variety of tangling is possible for any given topology. Related structures have been observed in synthetic materials and clathrin assemblies within cells.