This is the video of a talk I gave at the British Logic Colloquium, on the topic of “Random Graphs in Logic and Network Science”, attempting to make some initial connections between two very different ways of thinking about random graphs.
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[This is a sequel to my previous post Magforming the Johnson Solids. Please see that for a disclaimer and (if you want to understand the words in this post) the geometrical background. If you only want to see some pretty pictures, then ignore all this stuff and just scroll down…]
Last time, we investigated the shapes that can be built out of regular polygons, focusing on convex shapes – roughly speaking those with no holes, dents, or spikes. There are exactly 98 theoretically magformable convex polyhedra: all 5 of the Platonic solids, 11 Archimedean solids (out of 13 in total), 4 prisms (of an infinite family), 4 antiprisms (ditto), and 74 Johnson solids (out of 92).
Once you drop the requirement for convexity, the only limits are your imagination and the size of your magformer collection. In principle there are inifinitely many magformable polyhedra, because you can always stick more bits on. See robopenguin here, for example.
So what to do? Let’s return to the starting point of every discussion of polyhedra: the Platonic Solids.
It’s been a long time since I posted anything here… and that doesn’t change now, except in a technical sense. My writing activities are currently split between my work for the European Mathematical Society (see here for why you should join) and writing about the current political situation, with which I am greviously displeased, on social media. If you are interested in the latter, see my Twitter account on your right, and I have also started a blog on Medium. The first post is: Remaining Angry.
