therefore nine regular polyhedra – five convex and four star. Regular polyhedra in nature Each of the Platonic solids occurs naturally in one form or another. The tetrahedron, cube, and octahedron all occur as crystals. These by no means exhaust the numbers of possible forms of crystals (Smith, 1982, p212), of which there are 48. Neither the regular icosahedron nor the regular dodecahedron are amongst them, but crystals can have the shape of a pyritohedron, which is visually almost indistinguishable from a regular dodecahedron. Truly icosahedral crystals may be formed by quasicrystalline materials which are very rare in nature but can be produced in a laboratory. A more recent discovery is of a series of new types of carbon molecule, known as the fullerenes (see Curl, 1991). Although C60, the most easily produced fullerene, looks more or less spherical, some of the larger varieties (such as C240, C480 and C960) are hypothesised to take on the form of slightly rounded icosahedra, a few nanometres across. Regular polyhedra appear in biology as well. The coccolithophore Braarudosphaera bigelowii has a regular dodecahedral structure, about 10 micrometres across. In the early 20th century, Ernst Haeckel described a number of species of radiolarians, some of whose shells are shaped like various regular polyhedra. Examples include Circoporus octahedrus, Circogonia icosahedra, Lithocubus geometricus and Circorrhegma dodecahedra; the shapes of these creatures are indicated by their names. The outer protein shells of many viruses form regular polyhedra. For example, HIV is enclosed in a regular icosahedron, as is the head of a typical myovirus. In ancient times the Pythagoreans believed that there was a harmony between the regular polyhedra and the orbits of the planets. In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler studied data on planetary motion compiled by Tycho Brahe and for a decade tried to establish the Pythagorean ideal by finding a match between the sizes of the polyhedra and the sizes of the planets' orbits. His search failed in its original objective, but out of this research came Kepler's discoveries of the Kepler solids as regular polytopes, the realisation that the orbits of planets are not circles, and the laws of planetary motion for which he is now famous. In Kepler's time only five planets (excluding the earth) were known, nicely matching the number of Platonic solids. Kepler's work, and the discovery since that time of Uranus and Neptune, have invalidated the Pythagorean idea. Around