Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Antiparallelogram
Summary
In geometry, an antiparallelogram is a type of self-crossing quadrilateral. Like a parallelogram, an antiparallelogram has two opposite pairs of equal-length sides, but these pairs of sides are not in general parallel. Instead, each pair of sides is antiparallel with respect to the other, with sides in the longer pair crossing each other as in a scissors mechanism. Whereas a parallelogram's opposite angles are equal and oriented the same way, an antiparallelogram's are equal but oppositely oriented. Antiparallelograms are also called contraparallelograms or crossed parallelograms.
Antiparallelograms occur as the vertex figures of certain nonconvex uniform polyhedra. In the theory of four-bar linkages, the linkages with the form of an antiparallelogram are also called butterfly linkages or bow-tie linkages, and are used in the design of non-circular gears. In celestial mechanics, they occur in certain families of solutions to the 4-body problem.
Every antiparallelogram has an axis of symmetry, with all four vertices on a circle. It can be formed from an isosceles trapezoid by adding the two diagonals and removing two parallel sides. The signed area of every antiparallelogram is zero.
An antiparallelogram is a special case of a crossed quadrilateral, with two pairs of equal-length edges. In general, crossed quadrilaterals can have unequal edges. A special form of the antiparallelogram is a crossed rectangle, in which two opposite edges are parallel. Every antiparallelogram is a cyclic quadrilateral, meaning that its four vertices all lie on a single circle. Additionally, the four extended sides of any antiparallelogram are the bitangents of two circles, making antiparallelograms closely related to the tangential quadrilaterals, ex-tangential quadrilaterals, and kites (which are both tangential and ex-tangential).
Every antiparallelogram has an axis of symmetry through its crossing point. Because of this symmetry, it has two pairs of equal angles and two pairs of equal sides.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.