Customer Reviews

The Geometrical Foundation of Natural Structure: A Source Book of Design

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There is a paucity of good books in the area of polyhedral geometry, many books either provide too esoteric an account or too little information for the ordinary person to make use of. This book is one of the major works in the field that should be on any geometers bookshelf. Many classic works either show only a picture of a solid with no metric information or give a verbal description with no illustration to show what the solid looks like, this book is much more balanced in this regard and covers a wide scope of polyhedral information from the basics solids on into the three dimensional patterns that can be formed with them. This book is a great resource for artists, chemists, architects to use to be able to apply polyhedral mathematics to their fields, this is the kind of book that should be a required textbook in college but isn't. I have only two complaints about this book, the illustrations are a little hacked out looking and there is an inadequate accounting of how the properties of the two snub polyhedra are derived. I recommend this book as the best first introduction to the science of polyhedral geometry.

This book is must for all budding polyhedrists! The math is there, if you are interested, and the net diagrams are listed to allow easy understanding of the 2D "plan" that allows any competent paper model builder to fabricate the polyhedra, from Platonic to the Archimedian Solids. Williams also covers space packing (tessellating the solids) in a clear and easy to grasp explanation. This is truly one of the best educational resource for learning or teaching spatial relations! My only wish is that the author would have indicated where the net tabs needed to be!