Do you love icosahedra?

I do. On Sunday, I talked with a friend about an icosahedron for over an hour. Icosahedra, along with other polyhedra, are a wonderfully accessible entry point into math–and not just simple math, but deep math that gets you pretty far into geometry and topology, too! Just see my previous post about Matthew Wright’s guest lecture.)

A regular icosahedron is one of the five regular surfaces (“Platonic Solids”). It has twenty sides, all congruent, equilateral triangles. Here are three icosahedra:

Here’s a question which is easy to ask but hard to answer:

How many ways can you color an icosahedron with one of n colors per face?

If you think the answer is , that’s a good start–there are choices of color for 20 faces, so you just multiply, right?–but that’s not correct. Here we’re talking about an unoriented icosahedron that is free to rotate in space. For example, do the three icosahedra above have the same coloring? It’s hard to tell, right?

Solving this problem requires taking the symmetry of the icosahedron into account. In particular, it requires a result known as Burnside’s Lemma.

For the full solution to this problem, I’ll refer you to my article, authored together with friends Matthew Wright and Brian Bargh, which appears in this month’s issue of MAA’s Math Horizons Magazine here (JSTOR access required).

I’m very excited that I’m a published author!