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Conway-Guy Polyhedron


ConwayGuyPolyhedron

The Conway-Guy polyhedron, illustrated above, is the name given by Domokos and Kovács (2023) to the 19-face 34-vertex polyhedral solid independently found by Guy (1968; Conway et al. 1969) and Knowlton (1969) which is stable on just its bottom face, shown in yellow above. The dimensions of the polyhedral solid can be varied by changing the lengths of the bottom rectangular face and the top ridge, though only some combinations are unistable.

This solid remained the smallest known unistable polyhedron until the discovery of an 18-face 18-vertex polyhedral solid by Bezdek (2011).

The Conway-Guy polyhedron illustrated above with parameters a=29 and b=1 in the parametrization of Hafner (2014) is implemented in the Wolfram Language as PolyhedronData["ConwayGuyPolyhedron"]. Before scaling to unit minimum edge length, these correspond to ridge length 2b and bottom rectangle length 2b+2(b-a)cos^9(pi/9). For b=1, this gives the smallest possible integer a resulting in a unistable polyhedron.


See also

Gömböc, Unistable Polyhedron

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References

Bezdek, A. "Stability of Polyhedra." Workshop on Discrete Geometry, Sep 13-16,2011. Fields Institute, Toronto, Canada. pp. 2490-2491, 2011. http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/av/slides/11-12/wksp_geometry/bezdek/download.pdf.Conway, J. H.; Goldberg, M.; and Guy, R. K. Problem 66-12 in SIAM Rev. 11, 78-82, 1969.Croft, H. T.; Falconer, K. J.; and Guy, R. K. Problem B12 in Unsolved Problems in Geometry. New York: Springer-Verlag, p. 61, 1991.Domokos, G. and Kovács, F. "Conway's Spiral and a Discrete Gömböc with 21 Point Masses." Amer. Math. Monthly 130, 795-807, 2023.Guy, R. K. "A Unistable Polyhedron." Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Department of Mathematics, 1968.Hafner, I. "Some Unistable Polyhedra." https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/SomeUnistablePolyhedra/. June 17, 2014.Knowlton, K. C. "A Unistable Polyhedron With Only 19 Faces." Bell Telephone Laboratories, Report MM 69-1371-3, Jan. 3, 1969.Reshetov, A. "A Unistable Polyhedron With 14 Faces." Int. J. Comput. Geom. Appl. 24, 39-60, 2014.

Cite this as:

Weisstein, Eric W. "Conway-Guy Polyhedron." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Conway-GuyPolyhedron.html

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