Building TOWARD Geometry: Truncated Octahedra work as Rhombic Dodecahedra (Peter Kagey, HMC)

In late March, students, staff, and faculty were invited to help collaboratively build a large-scale geometric sculpture on the campus of Harvey Mudd College, demonstrating a relationship between truncated octahedra and rhombic dodecahedra, which are two examples of space-filling polyhedra. I’ll talk about the process of designing and building the sculpture, some geometry and combinatorics underlying the construction, and some discoveries we made along the way.