Tuesday, January 11, 2005

The Morning Mail

Today's morning mail (electronic) continues recent threads regarding the tetrahelix and the Richter Transformation. On synergeo, we've been discussing Bob Gray's colorful notes on these subjects, plus I brought up Gerald's finding that tetrahelix vertices, if they start rational, stay rational, but with no tetrahedron precisely juxtaposing (by translation) with any previous one.

I wrote a little Python program to generate tetrahelix coordinates in rational number format, using a tip from Adrian.

John Braley pointed out that the 3-tet boat (a short helix) is already an octahedron, just not a convex one. John Brawley complained that Bob's description of the transformation (to a regular one) is confusing. I think having Braley and Brawley, both Johns, on the same list is confusing, but I don't blame Bob.

I forwarded some of this material (electronically) to Julian, a Wanderer, an artist, and a physics student who did graduate work with buckyballs in Austria. Bob is a physics guy too.