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120 Cell Soap Bubble by John Sullivan

  
This image, produced by postdoc John Sullivan of the Geometry Center, represents tessellation of the 3-sphere by 120 regular dodecahedra. Three dodecahedra meet along each edge, at 120 degree angles, so the projection can be thought of as a cluster of soap bubbles. This is the first rendering of soap bubbles made from the basic laws of optics for thin films. For more information, see Sullivan's paper "Generating and rendering four-dimensional polytopes", The Mathematica Journal, 1(3) :76--85, 1991. This image was the cover picture (Winter 1991).

How to make it: This picture was rendered using a custom shader in RenderMan which simulates thin-film interference of light, thus producing the characteristic rainbow patterns of soap films.

Image created: Winter 1991

[120 Cell Soap Bubble]

Copyright © Winter 1991 by The Geometry Center, Univerity of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
For permission to use this image, contact permission@geom.umn.edu.

External viewing: small (100x100 9k gif), medium (500x500 125k gif), or original size (2400x2400 5,524k tiff).

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Created: Sat May 22 23:17:50 CDT 1999 --- Last modified: Sat May 22 23:17:50 CDT 1999