Whenever you show a mathematician two examples, s(he) wants to know them all. So, after the introductory examples of Butterfly and Fractal it’s time to make something more complicated. Jiangmei and I started by classifying all possible vertex types that can occur when you build polyhedra using only translations of four of the six types of faces of the rhombic dodecahedron (and make sure they attach to each other as they do it there). We found 14 different ones, and a particularly intriguing one is what we called the X:
The central vertex has valency 8, and we were wondering whether we could use it to build a triply periodic bifoldable polyhedron. It is easy to combine two such Xs to a Double X:
One can then put a second such Double X (with the order of the Xs switched) in front. Note that these are still polyhedra. Below are two deformation states of these quadruple Xs. We see that they are quite different.
So far, the construction can be periodically continued up/down and forward/backward. It is also possible to extend to the left/right, and there are in fact two such possibilities, allowing for infinite variations, because one has this choice for every left/right extension. They are indicated by the arrays below.
If you don’t have the time to build your own model, here again is a movie showing the unfolding/folding of a rotating Dos Equis.
The Inner Frame 