Six-Piece Dissection of a Tetrahedron into Its Mirror Image

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This Demonstration shows Jessen's (1968) improvement of Juel's (1903) 12-piece dissection of an irregular tetrahedron into its mirror image.

Contributed by: Izidor Hafner (March 2008)
Based on work by: Greg N. Frederickson
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA


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Juel's dissection uses the inscribed sphere while Gerling's dissection uses the circumscribed sphere. The vertices of a piece of Juel's are two vertices of the tetrahedron, the center of the inscribed sphere and its orthogonal projection on a face (the point of tangency). Jessen combined two such pieces into a symmetrical hexahedron with triangular faces (Frederickson 2002, 230-232).

Reference

[1] G. N. Frederickson, Dissections: Plane & Fancy, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 2002 p. 22.



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