Monday, April 27, 2015

[dwqjanwz] 12 tribes

Place 2 of the 12 vertices of a regular icosahedron at the north and south poles of the earth.  A third vertex on the prime meridian, though there are two ways to do this.

Where do the twelve points end up?  If given complete freedom of rotation around the north-south pole, can the other points hit somewhere interesting?

The points define centers of 12 pentagonal spherical patches arranged like a dodecahedron.  Can those areas be made to coincide with something interesting?

Inspired by: air travel makes transportation between any two points on earth equally easy, and technology makes communication the same, so it no longer makes as much sense for political boundaries to be defined by geographical physical features.  But suppose we do still want to partition the planet into regions for some reason.  Geometry would be elegant and precise.

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