snub cube

English

A snub cube

Etymology

From cubus simus, Kepler's name for this solid.

Noun

snub cube (plural snub cubes)

1. (geometry) An Archimedean solid with thirty-eight faces, of which six are squares (no two of which share a vertex) and thirty-two are equilateral triangles.
   • 1995, R. H. Hardin, N. J. A. Sloane, Codes (Spherical) and Designs (Experimental), Robert Calderbank (editor), Different Aspects of Coding Theory: American Mathematical Society Short Course, Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics, Volume 50, page 183,

     Robinson [67] showed in 1961 that the best packing of 24 points is achieved by the vertices of a regular snub cube, one of the Archimedean solids (cf. [20]).

   • 1996, William P. Schaefer, The Snub Cube in the Glanville Courtyard of the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology, The Chemical Intelligencer, reprinted in 2015, Balazs Hargittai, István Hargittai (editors), Culture of Chemistry: The Best Articles on the Human Side of 20th-Century Chemistry from the Archives of the Chemical Intelligencer, page 55,

     A wooden model, though, showed that with a sufficiently strong flow, the entire surface of the solid could be wet; we were given the go-ahead to install a five-foot-tall, granite snub cube in the fountain.

   • 2005, Charles M. Quinn, Patrick Fowler, David Redmond, Computational Quantum Chemistry II: The Group Theory Calculator, page 44:

     Two of these are chiral pairs, the dextro snub cube and its chiral partner, the laevo snub cube; the third is the regular orbit of T_d point symmetry, while the fourth is the regular orbit of T_h symmetry.

Synonyms

• (polyhedron with 6 square and 32 triangular faces): cubus sinus, snub cuboctahedron

Derived terms

• dextro snub cube
• laevo snub cube

Further reading

• Snub Cube on Wolfram MathWorld