Hexagonal Albert-prism

Geometry Level pending

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.


The answer is 70.529.

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1 solution

Marta Reece
Jan 25, 2017

Assuming unit sides for all the faces, A B = 1 2 \overline{AB}=\frac{1}{2} . From symmetry, AC must be perpendicular to AD. Since B A D = 6 0 \angle BAD=60^\circ the foreshortened C A B = 3 0 \angle CAB=30^\circ . From the right A B C \triangle ABC we get the foreshortened A C = . 5 c o s ( 3 0 ) = 1 3 \overline{AC}=\frac{.5}{cos(30^\circ)}=\frac{1}{\sqrt{3}} . 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 \overline{EC} . The side of the quadrilateral, A C \overline{AC} must in reality be 1. So from the right A E C \triangle AEC we get the E A C = a r c s i n ( 1 3 ) = 35.2643 9 \angle EAC=arcsin(\frac{1}{\sqrt{3}})=35.26439^\circ . Doubling this will give us 70.52 9 70.529^\circ .

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