Regular and semiregular polyhedra

Abstract

The cube, the octahedron, and the tetrahedron obviously have been admired for thousands of years. It is impossible to say who first described them. Certainly the Pythagoreans knew all about them. I understand that a dodecahedron was found in Italy which was apparently made in 500 B.C. or perhaps even earlier, and that icosahedral dice were used by the ancient Egyptians. They can be seen in the British Museum, although there is some doubt about their exact date. All the five so-called Platonic solids are described in the later books of Euclid. Subsequent writers have made it much easier to see that the number of Platonic solids is just five.