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A new pyramid-like shape always lands the same side up
A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a decades-old conjecture.
In 2023, Domokos — along with his graduate students Gergő Almádi and Krisztina Regős, and Robert Dawson of Saint Mary’s University in Canada — proved that it is indeed possible to distribute a tetrahedron’s weight so that it will sit on just one face. The mathematicians then showed that any tetrahedron with this feature can be made monostable if its center of mass is positioned within one of four “loading zones” — much smaller tetrahedral regions within the original shape. At the moment, it’s not clear what new theoretical insights the model of the monostable tetrahedron will provide — but experimenting with it might help mathematicians uncover other intriguing questions to ask about polyhedra.
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