The challenge is by using twelve tetrahedral pieces to reconstruct the body of a regular cube. They are provided below as cut and paste unfoldings! They were created using the marvelous package UnfoldPolyhedra written by Fukuda and Namiki For the first piece make four copies (think of this as a hint to achieve one of the decompositions).

  • piece one (make 4)
  • piece two
  • piece three
  • piece four
  • piece five
  • piece six
  • piece seven

    You should find at least 3 different decompositions. can you do it in more? why? It turns out that there are, up to symmetry, six possible ways of decomposing a regular cube into tetrahedra.

    Just as in 3-dimensional space tetrahedra are the building blocks of our puzzles, one can imagine that a similar building block must exist for 4 or more dimensions. How would the analogue of a tetrahedron in dimension 4 look like? It must have 5 vertices (one more than the dimension of the ambience space...) and all of its vertices must be connected by edges. Another property is that every subset of 4 vertices must define a facet and so on. A simplex of dimension d is the generalization for d-dimensional Euclidean space of the 3-dimensional tetrahedron. One can again consider the question of decomposing polytopes in higher dimensions into simplices. In particular the decompositions of higher dimensional cubes into smallest number of simplices is a notoriously hard problem. So far we only know the answer of this question up to seven dimensions.

    The general question of counting the different ways of decomposing a convex polyhedra is very hard and we only know the answer in a few cases. You may want to think of the analogue problem in the plane for simplicity: how many ways are there to decompose a n-gon into triangles? For example, what happens in the case of a hexagon? A simple explanation of how to recover the formula for the number of triangulations of a convex n-gon can be found in the book Introductory Combinatorics by Richard Brualdi (2nd ed. New York, North-Holland, 1992). A delightful explanation (in a delightful book!) about the deep mathematical structure behind the decompositions of polyhedra can be found in the last chapter of the book by Guenter Ziegler, Lectures on Polytopes (New York : Springer-Verlag, 1995).