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In B.M. Stewart's book Adventures Among the Toroids, toroidal shapes of many sorts are made. One of them is the ring of 8 octahedra, with 48 faces. The toroid is made with a single polygon -- the equilateral triangle.

ring of 8 octahedra

Are there single non-regular polygons that can make a toroidal shape with fewer than 48 faces? One restriction -- all neighboring polygons must be in different planes, to prevent things like the ring of 8 cubes.

The faces should be non-intersecting. The underlying graph of edges might be one of these, maybe.

transitive graphs

Ed Pegg
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  • Am I looking at it wrongly, or does the second example graph have some faces which are triangles and some which are quadrilaterals? – Peter Taylor Jul 31 '18 at 10:53

1 Answers1

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Let $y=2, x=\sqrt{5+2 \sqrt{2}}\approx 2.79793 $, Then the following toroid with green $y$ and blue $x$ lengths is made from 24 identical triangles. But there may be something smaller.

toroid24

Took less than 12 hours for someone to build it.

toroid24 paper

The net, with green points the 6 outer vertices: Toroid net

Is there anything smaller than 24 faces? Here's something larger.

Let $y=2, -127 + 124 x^2 - 26 x^4 - 4 x^6 + x^8=0, x\approx 2.31498614558$. Then the following toroid with green $y$ and blue $x$ lengths is made from 32 identical triangles.

enter image description here

Ed Pegg
  • 20,955