A morning with the permutohedron

Today we are revisiting an old project on a really neat shape -> the permutohedron:

“A fun shape for kids to explore – the permutohedron

I learned about this shape thanks to Allen Knutson at Cornell – he included a fun pic of a large permutohedron in the comment of the blog post above:

He also pointed me to a 3d print on Thingiverse that we used in the last project and again today:

“Permutahedron” by PFF000 on Thingiverse

So, I started today by having the boys describe the 3d printed shape. We have two versions – a larger one that unfortunately broke a little and a smaller – but in one piece! – version. Here’s what the boys had to say about the shapes:

Next I had the boys read the Wikipedia page on the permutohedron for about 10 min and then we discussed some of the ideas that they thought were interesting:

Finally, we built the 2-D permutohedron and showed how it was embedded in a 3d grid:

Definitely a fun project and it is always great to be able to have kids hold interesting math ideas in their hands!