Albert was going to be famous by coming up with a new family of solids made of regular polygons. There were going to be prisms, anti-prisms, and Albert-prisms. Each Albert-prism would have two identical large regular polygons for the end faces, both attended by a row of equilateral triangles. The two rows would meet at the distant vertices and by doing would create a line square faces. However, when he tried to make a paper model of the hexagonal Albert-prism, the model kept warping.
In order for the model to work, he should have used a different quadrilateral in place of a square. Find the smallest internal angle of this quadrilateral in degrees.
Give your answer to 3 decimal places.
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Assuming unit sides for all the faces, A B = 2 1 . From symmetry, AC must be perpendicular to AD. Since ∠ B A D = 6 0 ∘ the foreshortened ∠ C A B = 3 0 ∘ . From the right △ A B C we get the foreshortened A C = c o s ( 3 0 ∘ ) . 5 = 3 1 . If we look at the quadrilateral face (which has to be vertical based on symmetry) head on, this is exactly the actual length of E C . The side of the quadrilateral, A C must in reality be 1. So from the right △ A E C we get the ∠ E A C = a r c s i n ( 3 1 ) = 3 5 . 2 6 4 3 9 ∘ . Doubling this will give us 7 0 . 5 2 9 ∘ .