Rhombic dodecahedron

In geometry, the rhombic dodecahedron is a convex polyhedron with 12 congruent rhombic faces. It has 24 edges, and 14 vertices of two types. It is a Catalan solid, and the dual polyhedron of the cuboctahedron.Rhombic dodecahedronRhombic dissected hexagonA garnet crystalThis animation shows the construction of a rhombic dodecahedron from a cube, by inverting the center-face-pyramids of a cube.The first stellation of the rhombic dodecahedron3D model of decomposition into 12 pyramids and 4 half-cubes In geometry, the rhombic dodecahedron is a convex polyhedron with 12 congruent rhombic faces. It has 24 edges, and 14 vertices of two types. It is a Catalan solid, and the dual polyhedron of the cuboctahedron. The rhombic dodecahedron is a zonohedron. Its polyhedral dual is the cuboctahedron. The long diagonal of each face is exactly √2 times the length of the short diagonal, so that the acute angles on each face measure arccos(1/3), or approximately 70.53°. Being the dual of an Archimedean polyhedron, the rhombic dodecahedron is face-transitive, meaning the symmetry group of the solid acts transitively on the set of faces. In elementary terms, this means that for any two faces A and B there is a rotation or reflection of the solid that leaves it occupying the same region of space while moving face A to face B. The rhombic dodecahedron is one of the nine edge-transitive convex polyhedra, the others being the five Platonic solids, the cuboctahedron, the icosidodecahedron and the rhombic triacontahedron. The rhombic dodecahedron can be used to tessellate three-dimensional space. It can be stacked to fill a space much like hexagons fill a plane. This polyhedron in a space-filling tessellation can be seen as the Voronoi tessellation of the face-centered cubic lattice. It is the Brillouin zone of body centered cubic (bcc) crystals. Some minerals such as garnet form a rhombic dodecahedral crystal habit. Honey bees use the geometry of rhombic dodecahedra to form honeycombs from a tessellation of cells each of which is a hexagonal prism capped with half a rhombic dodecahedron. The rhombic dodecahedron also appears in the unit cells of diamond and diamondoids. In these cases, four vertices (alternate threefold ones) are absent, but the chemical bonds lie on the remaining edges. The graph of the rhombic dodecahedron is nonhamiltonian. A rhombic dodecahedron can be dissected with its center into 4 trigonal trapezohedra. These rhombohedra are the cells of a trigonal trapezohedral honeycomb. This is analogous to the dissection of a regular hexagon dissected into rhombi, and tiled in the plane as a rhombille. If the edge length of a rhombic dodecahedron is a, the radius of an inscribed sphere (tangent to each of the rhombic dodecahedron's faces) is