Interactive drawings of polyhedra and algebraic surfaces


Welcome to my collection of interactive geometric figures.
      Last updated on November 19, 2014.
  • My goal is to make these figures accessible to everybody!  If you prefer, for example, to skip the descriptive material and just view the pictures, that is perfectly OK!! 
  • Some of the descriptive material is intended for a general audience.  Other parts, including the equations, are intended for experts and math students. 
  • After your (java-enabled) web browser loads a picture, then you can move the figure with the mouse.  Specifically, hold the (left) mouse button down while moving a figure. 
  • The default type of motion is rotation -- by moving the mouse in different directions you can rotate the figure around different axes.  You can click on the small menu -- Mouse Rotates [r] -- at the top of a figure to change the type of motion to translation or scaling.

    An interactive figure that you can
    rotate by dragging it with the mouse.

    (Hold the left button down.)
  • ¿Did the figure in the upper right fail to load?
  • If so, then your browser may not be java-enabled.
  • Click here for suggestions about how to deal with this situation.  In some cases it may be something that "anyone" can do; in other cases you might ask a computer-proficient friend to help.
      Further info about the viewing setup is avaliable here.
 
From this page you can:
Polyhedra      
Coordinate Planes (with inline data)    
Cube    
Octahedron    
Tetrahedron    
Interlocked tetrahedra    
Two tetrahedra inscribed in a cube    
Icosahedron    
Dodecahedron
A cube inscribed in a dodecahedron
Truncated octahedron
Truncated tetrahedron
Truncated cube
Truncated icosahedron
Truncated cube / octahedron
             
Algebraic surfaces
    (This link leads to a page with thumbnail sketches of the surface figures.)
 
Quadric surfaces:
Tangent surfaces of space curves:
Images of generic projections:
Another ruled surface
Projective duality
Other surfaces:

 
 
        Background info from The Geometry Center about the viewing setup:
JGV is a Java program that lets you embed movable 3D objects in Web pages. Users can rotate, scale, and translate the objects interactively with the mouse.

JGV is written entirely in Java, which means that it will run in any Java-capable browser. In particular, it works with Firefox, Safari, Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Users who have current versions of any of these browsers do not need to download or install any additional software; the 3D object simply appears in place when they view any Web page which uses JGV.

If you are viewing this page with a Java-capable browser, you can move the object in the JGV panel by putting the mouse cursor over the object and dragging while holding down the left mouse button. Use the gray menu at the top to switch between rotating, translating, and scaling.

Click here to visit The Geometry Center's JGV homepage.

  Return to:


Comments to: roberts@math.umn.edu