Rich asks: << What's the back side of this object look like? I count 17 visible faces. Rich

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The colored depiction of the 19-face polyhedron is rotatable with one's mouse. ==Dan -----Original Message----- From: math-fun-bounces+rschroe=sandia.gov@mailman.xmission.com on behalf of James Propp Sent: Tue 4/10/2007 7:44 PM To: math-fun@mailman.xmission.com Subject: [math-fun] Re: unistable object

Science News' Math Trek has an interesting article this week, by Julie J. Rehmeyer. It's about a unistable object discovered by Gabor Domokos and Peter Varkonyi.

There is a prize offered for a polyhedral solution, but it's $10K/face-count. The authors don't expect to pay much. There's no discussion of the obvious first move, simply taking their rounded solution and using sandpaper to make a lot of tiny flat faces. I must be missing something. Why doesn't the 19-face polyhedron shown in http://mathworld.wolfram.com/UnistablePolyhedron.html qualify? Jim Propp