A pseudohedron

Abstract

The other day I received a long tube from a Canadian stranger containing a large poster featuring over a hundred polyhedra, including ‘all 92 Johnson polyhedra’. This term, though probably unfamiliar this side of the pond, was not completely unknown to me; it means convex polyhedra, excluding the regular and Archimedean ones, all of whose faces are regular polygons. Of course, as usual, we have to exclude those naughty polyhedra whose faces go around in pairs collecting squares (prisms) or equilateral triangles (antiprisms) and don’t know when to stop. The word convex is vital, otherwise there would be another infinite set. A lot of them are rather trivial, like sticking pyramids on the faces of a dodecahedron, but they include the deltahedra and many other interesting members. But they have at least one imitator who didn't quite make the grade. Trying to discover why, and how to coach him so that he would, I found that my spherical trigonometry was getting rather rusty so I set out to make one and see what was happening. I thought perhaps other readers would like to share this piece of antiresearch.