Adventures of a Computational Explorer by Stephen Wolfram

Author:Stephen Wolfram [Wolfram, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Biography / Science
Publisher: Wolfram Media
Published: 2019-10-19T05:00:00+00:00

The Story of Spikey

December 28, 2018

Spikeys Everywhere

We call it “Spikey,” and in my life today, it’s everywhere:

It comes from a 3D object—a polyhedron that’s called a rhombic hexecontahedron:

But what is its story, and how did we come to adopt it as our symbol?

The Origins of Spikey

Back in 1987, when we were developing the first version of Mathematica, one of our innovations was being able to generate resolution-independent 3D graphics from symbolic descriptions. In our early demos, this let us create wonderfully crisp images of Platonic solids. But as we approached the release of Mathematica 1.0, we wanted a more impressive example. So we decided to take the last of the Platonic solids—the icosahedron—and then make something more complex by a certain amount of stellation (or, more correctly, cumulation). (Yes, that’s what the original notebook interface looked like, 30 years ago….)

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