Reuleaux tetrahedron

Animation of a Reuleaux tetrahedron, showing also the tetrahedron from which it is formed.
Four balls intersect to form a Reuleaux tetrahedron.
Reuleaux Tetrahedron

The Reuleaux tetrahedron is the intersection of four balls of radius s centered at the vertices of a regular tetrahedron with side length s.[1] The spherical surface of the ball centered on each vertex passes through the other three vertices, which also form vertices of the Reuleaux tetrahedron. Thus the center of each ball is on the surfaces of the other three balls. The Reuleaux tetrahedron has the same face structure as a regular tetrahedron, but with curved faces: four vertices, and four curved faces, connected by six circular-arc edges.

This shape is defined and named by analogy to the Reuleaux triangle, a two-dimensional curve of constant width; both shapes are named after Franz Reuleaux, a 19th-century German engineer who did pioneering work on ways that machines translate one type of motion into another. One can find repeated claims in the mathematical literature that the Reuleaux tetrahedron is analogously a surface of constant width, but it is not true: the two midpoints of opposite edge arcs are separated by a larger distance,

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Weisstein was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

© MMXXIII Rich X Search. We shall prevail. All rights reserved. Rich X Search