Disphénoïde adouci

In geometry, the snub disphenoid, Siamese dodecahedron, triangular dodecahedron, trigonal dodecahedron, or dodecadeltahedron is a convex polyhedron with twelve equilateral triangles as its faces. It is not a regular polyhedron because some vertices have four faces and others have five. It is a dodecahedron, one of the eight deltahedra (convex polyhedra with equilateral triangle faces), and is the 84th Johnson solid (non-uniform convex polyhedra with regular faces). It can be thought of as a square antiprism where both squares are replaced with two equilateral triangles. The snub disphenoid is also the vertex figure of the isogonal 13-5 step prism, a polychoron constructed from a 13-13 duoprism by selecting a vertex on a tridecagon, then selecting the 5th vertex on the next tridecagon, doing so until reaching the original tridecagon. It cannot be made uniform, however, because the snub disphenoid has no circumscribed sphere. This shape was called a Siamese dodecahedron in the paper by Hans Freudenthal and B. L. van der Waerden (1947) which first described the set of eight convex deltahedra. The dodecadeltahedron name was given to the same shape by , referring to the fact that it is a 12-sided deltahedron. There are other simplicial dodecahedra, such as the hexagonal bipyramid, but this is the only one that can be realized with equilateral faces. Bernal was interested in the shapes of holes left in irregular close-packed arrangements of spheres, so he used a restrictive definition of deltahedra, in which a deltahedron is a convex polyhedron with triangular faces that can be formed by the centers of a collection of congruent spheres, whose tangencies represent polyhedron edges, and such that there is no room to pack another sphere inside the cage created by this system of spheres. This restrictive definition disallows the triangular bipyramid (as forming two tetrahedral holes rather than a single hole), pentagonal bipyramid (because the spheres for its apexes interpenetrate, so it cannot occur in sphere packings), and icosahedron (because it has interior room for another sphere).