In geometry, the truncated icosahedron is an Archimedean solid, one of 13 convex isogonal nonprismatic solids whose 32 faces are two or more types of regular polygons. It is the only one of these shapes that does not contain triangles or squares. In general usage, the degree of truncation is assumed to be uniform unless specified.
It has 12 regular pentagonal faces, 20 regular hexagonal faces, 60 vertices and 90 edges.
It is the Goldberg polyhedron GPV(1,1) or {5+,3}1,1, containing pentagonal and hexagonal faces.
This geometry is associated with footballs (soccer balls) typically patterned with white hexagons and black pentagons. Geodesic domes such as those whose architecture Buckminster Fuller pioneered are often based on this structure. It also corresponds to the geometry of the fullerene C60 ("buckyball") molecule.
It is used in the cell-transitive hyperbolic space-filling tessellation, the bitruncated order-5 dodecahedral honeycomb.
This polyhedron can be constructed from an icosahedron by truncating, or cutting off, each of the 12 vertices at the one-third mark of each edge, creating 12 pentagonal faces and transforming the original 20 triangle faces into regular hexagons.
In geometry and graph theory, there are some standard polyhedron characteristics.
Cartesian coordinates for the vertices of a truncated icosahedron centered at the origin are all even permutations of:
(0, ±1, ±3φ)
(±1, ±(2 + φ), ±2φ)
(±φ, ±2, ±(2φ + 1))
where φ = 1 + /2 is the golden mean. The circumradius is ≈ 4.956 and the edges have length 2.
The truncated icosahedron has five special orthogonal projections, centered, on a vertex, on two types of edges, and two types of faces: hexagonal and pentagonal. The last two correspond to the A2 and H2 Coxeter planes.
The truncated icosahedron can also be represented as a spherical tiling, and projected onto the plane via a stereographic projection. This projection is conformal, preserving angles but not areas or lengths. Straight lines on the sphere are projected as circular arcs on the plane.