A fun zometool project with decagons

Earlier in the week I saw a really neat twitter thread that had this post:

The projections are closely related to quasicrystals as well. The Penrose tilings come from projections of a 5-cube (which stack infinitely in 5D like cubes in 3D).
This shows all the rhombic dissections of a decagon.https://t.co/hmk3Vt0fHnhttps://t.co/knff5ywvn9 pic.twitter.com/PRClCio2Hu

— Tom Ruen (@Tom_Ruen) January 31, 2020

At the time I thought it would be really fun to see if we could make these shapes with our Zometool set. We tried it out this morning – and success!

After we finished building them, I had my younger son talk about the shapes. Here’s the discussion of the first three:

And here’s the description of the next 4:

I’m always super happy when shapes I see on twitter can be made from our Zometool set!

We are going to try to make the shape corresponding to the projection of the 5 dimensional cube for tomorrow’s project. Should be really fun.

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