When Apple announced in July this year they had sold 1 billion iPhones, I started wondering about another brick maker: How many blocks has Lego made? Their friendly customer service couldn’t tell me how many elements they have made in total, but the yearly production is 19 billion. Scary. Unfortunately, the shape of the standard lego brick is too limited for my needs. For a long time, I had wanted a lego brick in the shape of a rhombic dodecahedron (better would be a four dimensional lego hypercube of which the rhombic dodecahedron is a mere shadow, but let’s not be delusional). As you can see, this polyhedron tiles space as well if not better than the cube.
Various companies have produced shapes with more or less cleverly embedded magnets, but keeping track of the polarity on all faces of a 12 sided object is tricky. And this would be a lot of magnets. The actual problem, however, is the enormous amount of choices one has: 12 faces to attach to is just too much. I strongly believe that Lego’s success stems from the fact that they have reduced the number of possible ways how you can attach two lego pieces dramatically. No choice means dictatorship, two choices US capitalism, but more choices sounds like European liberalism or even anarchism, and we see where that leads.
This gave me the idea to replace the complicated rhombic dodecahedron by a simple object that is less attachable. Here is the new brick.
To make it, take three faces of the rhombic dodecahedron that are symmetrically positioned, and replace each of the three rhombi by its inscribed ellipse. Then take the convex hull of the ellipses. The resulting shape consists of the ellipses, two equilateral triangles in parallel planes, and three intrinsically flat mantel pieces.
You will notice that there are two versions of this brick, a left and a right handed one. This leaves just the right amount of choices.
If you alternatingly attach a left to a right brick, you get a hexagonal annulus. Remember that we are still tiling space using slimmed down versions of the rhombic dodecahedron. Due to our imposed limitation of choice, nor every place can be reached anymore. The hexagonal annulus is a little simplistic. What do we get if we just use the left handed brick?
Let’s start with a red central brick, attach a brick on all three sides, and another six at the free faces of the new bricks. We notice that the bricks can occur in four different rotated positions. I have distinguished them by color. Add another 12 bricks:
And another 24. No worry, no intersections can occur, because, I insist, we just tile a portion of space with rhombic dodecahedra.
Now we see that the tree like structure we have produced so far does not persist. In the next generation, we obtain closed cycles of length 10, and we finally recognize the Laves graph.
In the very near future you will see what else one can make with these bricks.
The Inner Frame 