Webinar playback: some families of polyhedra

On Saturday, I gave my first ever webinar, on the topic of “Some families of polyhedra”. And if you don’t know your tetrahemihexahedron from your tridiminished rhombicosidodecahedron, the good news is that the whole thing is available to see and hear here. It’s just over an hour long, but of course one advantage the recorded version has over the live one is the ability to fast forward, pause, and rewind.

It was hosted over at Mathfuture, by Maria Droujkova. My aim in the talk was to give a very brisk overview of how several different families of wonderful, complex shapes all arise from juggling a very small number of simple criteria. I’m separately uploading the slides for my presentation here [pdf]. They are quite rough and ready, without any detailed explanations, or even any pictures – I used Stella for those. But it does sketch the central story (which I also covered in this blogpost). I may spruce them up one day, if I give the same talk again.

I found the whole thing a thoroughly enjoyable experience, and the Elluminate technology worked extremely smoothly. The format allowed me to talk while sharing my whole desktop with the audience, with the optimal result of people being able to hear my voice and watch everything I was doing, without having to endure looking at my face. And we could all do it from the comfort of our living rooms! This is sort of thing the internet was intended for, isn’t it?

2 responses to “Webinar playback: some families of polyhedra”

  1. Thank you for presenting, Richard! That was wonderful. I’d love to see a math game developed on the basis of your “now on, now off” system of polyhedra restrictions. People do this for polygons, which are simpler, but with the new GeoGebra 3d and other tools this can be very doable. I just linked your wiki page to the Math Game Design group to run the idea by them: https://groups.google.com/group/mathgamedesign/browse_thread/thread/2c0a92ecfbb234d8

    1. Thanks for the invitation Maria – it was great for me to experience this wonderful new technology. And if you enjoyed the presentation, so much the better!

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The cover of the book Huge Numbers by Richard Elwes
Huge Numbers
(Basic Books, April 2026)