#cuboctahedra

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A Cluster of Fifteen Cuboctahedra

There’s one cuboctahedron in the center of this cluster, with each of its fourteen faces augmented by another cuboctahedron. The image below uses coloring of each face by its number of sides, while the next one is in “rainbow color mode.” I made these images using Stella 4d, which you can try for free at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.

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Filling Space with Cuboctahedra and Octahedra

To get started packing space with cuboctahedra and octahedra, I started with a single octahedron, then augmented its square faces with additional cuboctahedra.

Next, I augmented each triangular face with a blue octahedron.

Next, I augmented each square face with a cuboctahedron.

Next, I added still more cuboctahedra.

The next step was to augment the yellow triangular faces with blue…

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Honeycomb Made of Cuboctahedra and Octahedra This is the three-dimensional version of what is called a tessellation in two dimensions. It fills space, and can be continued in all directions.

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Here we see the illustrious cuboctahedron, or vector equilibrium. Along with the truncated octahedron, it can be considered, in some sense, a three-dimensional analogue to the hexagon. Though it has no hexagonal faces, the cuboctahedron can be seen to consist of four hexagonal rings or planes arranged in the manner of tetrahedral symmetry. That is, if one took a tetrahedron, replaced its four faces with hexagons (as for instance with a truncated tetrahedron), and collapsed all four hexagonal sides so that they all shared a common center, the vertices of the hexagons would describe a cuboctahedron, with each vertex shared between two intersecting hexagons, collapsing the original 24 vertices of the four hexagons into the 12 vertices of the cuboctahedron. (Likewise, of course, the cuboctahedron can simply be seen as a sort of "expanded" tetrahedron, with four of its eight triangular faces representing the original four faces of an inner tetrahedron, the remaining four triangles representing its four vertices, and the square faces representing its edges.) Tetrahedral symmetry being the simplest type of polyhedral symmetry, and the only one suited to this sort of fitting together of hexagonal planes, the cuboctahedron represents a unique extension of and analogue to hexagonal symmetry in three dimensions.