The Platonic solids have been known since antiquity.
Ornamented models of them can be found
among the carved stone balls created by the late neolithicpeople of Scotland at least 1000 years
before Plato (Atiyah and Sutcliffe 2003). Dice go back to the dawn of civilization with shapes that
augured formal charting of Platonic solids.
The ancient Greeks studied the Platonic solids extensively. Some sources (such as Proclus)
credit Pythagoras with their discovery. Other evidence suggests he may have only been familiar with
the tetrahedron, cube, and dodecahedron, and that the discovery of the octahedron and icosahedron
belong to Theaetetus, a contemporary of Plato. In any case, Theaetetus gave a mathematical
description of all five and may have been responsible for the first known proof that there are no other
convex regular polyhedra.
The Platonic solids feature prominently in the philosophy of Plato for whom they are named. Plato
wrote about them in the dialogue Timaeus c.360 B.C. in which he associated each of the
four classical elements (earth, air, water, and fire) with a regular solid. Earth was associated with the
cube, air with the octahedron, water with the icosahedron, and fire with the tetrahedron. There was
intuitive justification for these associations: the heat of fire feels sharp and stabbing (like little
tetrahedra). Air is made of the octahedron; its minuscule components are so smooth that one can
barely feel it. Water, the icosahedron, flows out of one's hand when picked up, as if it is made of tiny
little balls. By contrast, a highly un-spherical solid, the hexahedron (cube) represents earth. These
clumsy little solids cause dirt to crumble and break when picked up, in stark difference to the smooth
flow of water. Moreover, the solidity of the Earth was believed to be due to the fact that the cube is
the only regular solid thattesselates Euclidean space. The fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron,
Plato obscurely remarks, "...the god used for arranging the constellations on the whole
heaven". Aristotle added a fifth element, aithêr (aether in Latin, "ether" in English) and postulated
that the heavens were made of this element, but he had no interest in matching it with Plato's fifth
solid.
Euclid gave a complete mathematical description of the Platonic solids in the Elements, the last book
(Book XIII) of which is devoted to their properties. Propositions 13–17 in Book XIII describe the
construction of the tetrahedron, octahedron, cube, icosahedron, and dodecahedron in that order. For
each solid Euclid finds the ratio of the diameter of the circumscribed sphere to the edge length. In
Proposition 18 he argues that there are no further convex regular polyhedra. Andreas Speiserhas
advocated the view that the construction of the 5 regular solids is the chief goal of the deductive
system canonized in "Elements".[2] Much of the information in Book XIII is probably derived from the
work of Theaetetus.
In the 16th century, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler attempted to find a relation between
the five extraterrestrialplanets known at that time and the five Platonic solids. In Mysterium
Cosmographicum, published in 1596, Kepler laid out a model of the solar system in which the five
solids were set inside one another and separated by a series of inscribed and circumscribed
spheres. The six spheres each corresponded to one of the planets
(Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, andSaturn). The solids were ordered with the innermost being
the octahedron, followed by the icosahedron, dodecahedron, tetrahedron, and finally the cube. In
this way the structure of the solar system and the distance relationships between the planets was
dictated by the Platonic solids. In the end, Kepler's original idea had to be abandoned, but out of his
research came the recognition that the orbits of planets are ellipses rather than circles, as well as his
two laws of orbital dynamics, changing the courses of physics and astronomy, plus the discovery of
the Kepler solids.
