Three Mathematicians Have Resolved A Fundamental Question About Straight Paths On The 12-Sided Platonic Solid

Abstractions on Nautilus: Mathematicians Report New Discover... http://abstractions.nautil.us/article/612/mathematicians-report-n...
AUGUST 2020
Three mathematicians have resolved

a fundamental question about
straight paths on the 12-sided
Platonic solid.
1 of 8 12/09/2020, 16.10
ven though mathematicians have spent over 2,000 years

dissecting the structure of the five Platonic solids—the
tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron and
dodecahedron—there’s still a lot we don’t know about
them.
Now, a trio of mathematicians has resolved one of the most basic

questions about the dodecahedron.
Suppose you stand at one of the corners of a Platonic solid. Is there

some straight path you could take that would eventually return you to
your starting point without passing through any of the other corners? For
the four Platonic solids built out of squares or equilateral triangles—the
cube, tetrahedron, octahedron and icosahedron
—mathematicians figured out that the answer is no. Any straight path
starting from a corner will either hit another corner or wind around
forever without returning home. But with the dodecahedron, which is
formed from 12 pentagons, mathematicians didn’t know what to expect.
Now Jayadev Athreya, David Aulicino and Patrick Hooper have shown
that an infinite number of such paths do in fact exist on the
dodecahedron. Their paper, published in May 2020 in Experimental
Mathematics, shows that these paths can be divided into 31 natural
families.
The solution required modern techniques and computer algorithms.

“Twenty years ago, [this question] was absolutely out of reach; 10 years
ago it would require an enormous effort of writing all necessary software,
so only now all the factors came together,” wrote Anton Zorich, of the
Institute of Mathematics of Jussieu in Paris, in an email.
The project began in 2016 when Athreya, of the University of
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they built the different solids, it occurred to Aulicino that a body of recent
research on flat geometry might be just what they’d need to understand
straight paths on the dodecahedron. “We were literally putting these
things together,” Athreya said. “So it was kind of idle exploration meets
an opportunity.”
Together with Hooper, of the City College of New York, the researchers
figured out how to classify all the straight paths from one corner back to
itself that avoid other corners.
Their analysis is “an elegant solution,” said Howard Masur of the

University of Chicago. “It’s one of these things where I can say, without
any hesitation, ‘Goodness, oh, I wish I had done that!’”
Hidden Symmetries
Although mathematicians have speculated about straight paths on the

dodecahedron for more than a century, there’s been a resurgence of
interest in the subject in recent years following gains in understanding
“translation surfaces.” These are surfaces formed by gluing together
parallel sides of a polygon, and they’ve proved useful for studying a wide
range of topics involving straight paths on shapes with corners,
from billiard table trajectories to the question of when a single light can
illuminate an entire mirrored room.
In all these problems, the basic idea is to unroll your shape in a way that
makes the paths you are studying simpler. So to understand straight
paths on a Platonic solid, you could start by cutting open enough edges
to make the solid lie flat, forming what mathematicians call a net. One
net for the cube, for example, is a T shape made of six squares.
3 of 8 12/09/2020, 16.10
A p ap er do de c a he dr o n co ns t ru ct e d i n 2 0 1 8 b y Da v i d
Au lic ino a nd J a y ad e v A t h r ey a t o s h ow t h a t st r a igh t p at h s
f rom a v er t e x b a ck t o it s elf w hil e a vo id in g ot he r ve r ti c e s
ar e in f ac t p os s ible .
Pa t ric k H oo p e r
Imagine that we’ve flattened out the dodecahedron, and now we’re
walking along this flat shape in some chosen direction. Eventually we’ll
hit the edge of the net, at which point our path will hop to a different
pentagon (whichever one was glued to our current pentagon before we
cut open the dodecahedron). Whenever the path hops, it also rotates by
some multiple of 36 degrees.
To avoid all this hopping and rotating, when we hit an edge of the net we
could instead glue on a new, rotated copy of the net and continue
straight into it. We’ve added some redundancy: Now we have two
different pentagons representing each pentagon on the original
dodecahedron. So we’ve made our world more complicated—but our
path has gotten simpler. We can keep adding a new net each time we
need to expand beyond the edge of our world.
4 of 8 12/09/2020, 16.10
net we add will have the same orientation as the one we started with.
That means this 11th net is related to the original one by a simple shift—
what mathematicians call a translation. Instead of gluing on an 11th net,
we could simply glue the edge of the 10th net to the corresponding
parallel edge in the original net. Our shape will no longer lie flat on the
table, but mathematicians think of it as still “remembering” the flat
geometry from its previous incarnation—so, for instance, paths are
considered straight if they were straight in the unglued shape. After we
do all such possible gluings of corresponding parallel edges, we end up
with what is called a translation surface.
5 of 8 12/09/2020, 16.10
At h rey a’s r ig ht arm b e a r s a t at t o o of his f a vo ri t e

t ran s l at ion s u r f a c e — a d ou ble p en t a g on .
Ra d h ik a G o v i nd ra ja n
The resulting surface is a highly redundant representation of the

dodecahedron, with 10 copies of each pentagon. And it’s massively
more complicated: It glues up into a shape like a doughnut with 81
holes. Nevertheless, this complicated shape allowed the three
researchers to access the rich theory of translation surfaces.
To tackle this giant surface, the mathematicians rolled up their sleeves

—figuratively and literally. After working on the problem for a few
6 of 8 12/09/2020, 16.10
the most studied translation surfaces. Called the double pentagon, it is

made by attaching two pentagons along a single edge and then gluing
together parallel sides to create a two-holed doughnut with a rich
collection of symmetries.
This shape also happened to be tattooed on Athreya’s arm. “The double

pentagon was something that I already knew and loved,” said Athreya,
who got the tattoo a year before he and Aulicino started thinking about
the dodecahedron.
Because the double pentagon and the dodecahedron are geometric

cousins, the former’s high degree of symmetry can elucidate the
structure of the latter. It’s an “amazing hidden symmetry,” said Alex
Eskin of the University of Chicago (who was Athreya’s doctoral adviser
about 15 years ago). “The fact that the dodecahedron has this hidden
symmetry group is, I think, quite remarkable.”
The relationship between these surfaces meant that the researchers

could tap into an algorithm for analyzing highly symmetric translation
surfaces developed by Myriam Finster of the Karlsruhe Institute of
Technology in Germany. By adapting Finster’s algorithm, the
researchers were able to identify all the straight paths on the
dodecahedron from a corner to itself, and to classify these paths via the
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my whole career,” Athreya said. “It’s important to keep playing with

things.”
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Abstractions is Reprinted with permission SERVICE JOBS
from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions
blog.
ERICA KLARREICH has been writing about mathematics and science

for more than a decade. She has a doctorate in mathematics from
Stony Brook University and is a graduate of the Science
Communication Program at the University of California, Santa
Cruz. Her work has been reprinted in “The Best Writing on
Mathematics 2010” and “The Best Writing on Mathematics 2011.”
Lead image: Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine
Video: In this Numberphile episode, Jayadev Athreya explains how he

and his colleagues solved a longstanding problem about straight paths
on a dodecahedron.
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine's Abstractions blog.
8 of 8 12/09/2020, 16.10

Three Mathematicians Have Resolved A Fundamental Question About Straight Paths On The 12-Sided Platonic Solid

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Abstractions on Nautilus: Mathematicians Report New Discover... http://abstractions.nautil.us/article/612/mathematicians-report-n...

Three mathematicians have resolved

ven though mathematicians have spent over 2,000 years

Now, a trio of mathematicians has resolved one of the most basic

Suppose you stand at one of the corners of a Platonic solid. Is there

The solution required modern techniques and computer algorithms.

The project began in 2016 when Athreya, of the University of

Their analysis is “an elegant solution,” said Howard Masur of the

Although mathematicians have speculated about straight paths on the

At h rey a’s r ig ht arm b e a r s a t at t o o of his f a vo ri t e

The resulting surface is a highly redundant representation of the

To tackle this giant surface, the mathematicians rolled up their sleeves

the most studied translation surfaces. Called the double pentagon, it is

This shape also happened to be tattooed on Athreya’s arm. “The double

Because the double pentagon and the dodecahedron are geometric

The relationship between these surfaces meant that the researchers

my whole career,” Athreya said. “It’s important to keep playing with

NAUTILUS: SCIENCE ABOUT SUBSCRIBE RSS

CONNECTED TERMS OF CONTACT / DONATE

ERICA KLARREICH has been writing about mathematics and science

Lead image: Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine

Video: In this Numberphile episode, Jayadev Athreya explains how he

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine's Abstractions blog.

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