I was amused by this report of a petition to change the representation of soccer balls on UK signs. At present the image is of a ball divided into brown and white hexagons. At least on one side.
The problem is, if it’s hexagons all the way around, it’s a geometric impossibility. You can’t have a convex polyhedron consisting solely of hexagons, regular or otherwise. In fact: If a convex polyhedron has only hexagons and/or pentagons as faces, then there must be at least 12 pentagons.
The proof is based on Euler’s polyhedron formula: If a convex polyhedron has vertices, edges, and faces, then
.
For our hex-and-pent-agon polyhedron, consisting of hexagons and pentagons, , of course. What’s ? Well, each hexagon has 6 edges and each pentagon has 5, but that counts each edge twice since each edge belongs to two faces. So .
Now, at each vertex, at least 3 edges meet. If you add up the number of edges at each vertex over all vertices you get at least ; but since each edge contributes 2 to that total, .
But from Euler’s formula,
or
and substituting our formulas for and ,
or
or
or
.
QED.
(The equality holds if every vertex has 3 edges — or equivalently, 3 faces. In particular, if you’re using only regular hexagons and pentagons, then there isn’t room at a vertex for more than 3 faces to meet there. So for a polyhedron made of regular hexagons and pentagons, or any polyhedron with exactly three hexagons and/or pentagons meeting at each vertex, .)
Hence the government must be petitioned. As The Aperiodical says, “Ban this hexagonal filth!”
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