In
geometryGeometry arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers ....
, the
snub disphenoid is one of the
Johnson solidIn geometry, a Johnson solid is a strictly convex polyhedron, each face of which is a regular polygon, but which is not uniform, i.e., not a Platonic solid, Archimedean solid, prism or antiprism. There is no requirement that each face must be the same polygon, or that the same polygons join around...
s (
J84). It is a three-dimensional solid that has only
equilateral triangles as faces, and is therefore a
deltahedronA deltahedron is a polyhedron whose faces are all equilateral triangles. The name is taken from the Greek majuscule delta , which has the shape of an equilateral triangle. There are infinitely many deltahedra, but of these only eight are convex, having 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 and 20 faces...
. It is not a
regular polyhedronA regular polyhedron is a polyhedron whose faces are congruent regular polygons which are assembled in the same way around each vertex. A regular polyhedron is highly symmetrical, being all of edge-transitive, vertex-transitive and face-transitive - i.e. it is transitive on its flags...
because some
verticesIn geometry, a vertex is a special kind of point that describes the corners or intersections of geometric shapes.-Of an angle:...
have four
facesIn geometry, a face of a polyhedron is any of the polygons that make up its boundaries. For example, any of the squares that bound a cube is a face of the cube...
and others have five. It is one of the elementary Johnson solids that do not arise from "cut and paste" manipulations of the
PlatonicIn geometry, a Platonic solid is a convex polyhedron that is regular, in the sense of a regular polygon. Specifically, the faces of a Platonic solid are congruent regular polygons, with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex; thus, all its edges are congruent, as are its vertices and...
and
ArchimedeanIn geometry an Archimedean solid is a highly symmetric, semi-regular convex polyhedron composed of two or more types of regular polygons meeting in identical vertices...
solids.
The 92 Johnson solids were named and described by Norman Johnson in 1966.
It can be seen as the 8 triangular faces of the
square antiprismIn geometry, the square antiprism is the second in an infinite set of antiprisms formed by an even-numbered sequence of triangle sides closed by two polygon caps...
with the two squares replaced by pairs of triangles.
It was called a
Siamese dodecahedron in the paper by Freudenthal and van der Waerden which first described it in 1947 in the set of eight convex
deltahedraA deltahedron is a polyhedron whose faces are all equilateral triangles. The name is taken from the Greek majuscule delta , which has the shape of an equilateral triangle. There are infinitely many deltahedra, but of these only eight are convex, having 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 and 20 faces...
.
The snub disphenoid is
4-connectedIn graph theory, a graph G with vertex set V is said to be k-vertex-connected if the graph remains connected when you delete fewer than k vertices from the graph...
, meaning that it takes the removal of four vertices to disconnect the remaining vertices. It is one of only four 4-connected
simplicialIn geometry, a simplicial polytope is a d-polytope whose facets are all simplices.For example, a simplicial polyhedron contains only triangular faces and corresponds via Steinitz's theorem to a maximal planar graph....
well-coveredIn graph theory, a well-covered graph is an undirected graph in which every minimal vertex cover has the same size as every other minimal vertex cover. Well-covered graphs were defined and first studied by .-Definitions:...
polyhedra, meaning that all of the
maximal independent setIn graph theory, a maximal independent set or maximal stable set is an independent set that is not a subset of any other independent set. That is, it is a set S such that every edge of the graph has at least one endpoint not in S and every vertex not in S has at least one neighbor in S...
s of its vertices have the same size. The other three polyhedra with this property are the regular octahedron, the
pentagonal dipyramidIn geometry, the pentagonal bipyramid is third of the infinite set of face-transitive bipyramids.Each bipyramid is the dual of a uniform prism.If the faces are equilateral triangles, it is a deltahedron and a Johnson solid...
, and an irregular polyhedron with 12 vertices and 20 triangular faces .