for tetrahedra. Duality of the regular polyhedra In a dual pair of polyhedra, the vertices of one polyhedron correspond to the faces of the other, and vice versa. The regular polyhedra show this duality as follows: The tetrahedron is self-dual, i.e. it pairs with itself. The cube and octahedron are dual to each other. The icosahedron and dodecahedron are dual to each other. The small stellated dodecahedron and great dodecahedron are dual to each other. The great stellated dodecahedron and great icosahedron are dual to each other. The Schläfli symbol of the dual is just the original written backwards, for example the dual of {5, 3} is {3, 5}. History Prehistory Stones carved in shapes resembling clusters of spheres or knobs have been found in Scotland and may be as much as 4,000 years old. Some of these stones show not only the symmetries of the five Platonic solids, but also some of the relations of duality amongst them (that is, that the centres of the faces of the cube gives the vertices of an octahedron). Examples of these stones are on display in the John Evans room of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. Why these objects were made, or how their creators gained the inspiration for them, is a mystery. There is doubt regarding the mathematical interpretation of these objects, as many have non-platonic forms, and perhaps only one has been found to be a true icosahedron, as opposed to a reinterpretation of the icosahedron dual, the dodecahedron. It is also possible that the Etruscans preceded the Greeks in their awareness of at least some of the regular polyhedra, as evidenced by the discovery near Padua (in Northern Italy) in the late 19th century of a dodecahedron made of soapstone, and dating back more than 2,500 years (Lindemann, 1987). Greeks The earliest known written records of the regular convex solids originated from Classical Greece. When these solids were all discovered and by whom is not known, but Theaetetus (an Athenian) was the first to give a mathematical description of all five (Van der Waerden, 1954), (Euclid, book XIII). H.S.M. Coxeter (Coxeter, 1948, Section 1.9) credits Plato (400 BC) with having made models of them, and mentions that one of the earlier Pythagoreans, Timaeus of Locri, used all five in a correspondence between the polyhedra and the nature of the universe as it was then perceived – this correspondence