Texts and Readings in Mathematics

Since antiquity, people knew that there are only five regular solids, i.e. polyhedra whose all faces are regular polygons and all solid angles are also regular. These solids are, of course, the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the cube, the icosahedron, and the dodecahedron. Later, much attention was drawn to the question of how to describe polyhedra with other types of regularity conditions. The author puts together many facts known in this direction. He formulates four regularity conditions (two for faces and two for solid angles) and for any combination of their conditions lists all the corresponding polyhedra. In this way, he obtains such very interesting classes of solids as 13 semiregular solids, or 8 deltahedra, or 92 regularly faces polyhedra, etc. In later chapters the author presents some related topics of geometry of solids, like star polyhedra and plane tessellations. In the concluding chapter, a complete solution of the Hilbert 3rd problem is given.

Supplied with many figures, the book can be easily read by anyone interested in this beautiful classical geometry.