Science Gift Ideas: Zome Tool

ZomeTool’s connector balls are small rhombicosidodecahedrons

I started playing with Zome Tool after watching the college lecture series Joy of Thinking: The Beauty and Power of Classical Mathematical Ideas on DVD, which required no mathematical background and I highly recommend for anyone interested in learning about why Math totally rocks from a humanistic perspective. I wanted to try out some of the geometrical concepts the lecture series talked about and needed a construction set that would suit this need.

Zome Tool is like an errector set, only incredibly geometrically well thought-out. The vertices, connector balls, for the Zome Tool are small rhombicosidodecahedrons, one of the 13 types of Archmedean Solids (this link has 3-D examples that you can rotate). This means that there are three types of connections for the edges, a pentagon, rectangle, and equilateral triangle; and for this reason, the edge pieces come in three different color-coded types.

The length of these edge pieces are related to one another along the Golden Mean, a proportion found throughout nature, art, and architecture, and one that allowed me to build three interlaced golden rectangles inside an icosahedron.

Icosahedron with Three Interlaced Golden Rectangles

I later added another layer to this, by putting the icosahedron inside the dodecahedron with it’s verticies touching the middle of each of the dodecahedron’s faces.

Also on a Holiday note, check out a Zome Christmas Tree