On model flexibility of the Jessen orthogonal icosahedron
A polyhedron in the 3-dimensional space is called flexible, if it admits continuous deformation, so that the faces do not change, but dihedral edges between some faces do. (There are examples of flexible polyhedra.) However, physical models of some non-flexible polyhedra seem to behave as if they were flexible. They are called model flexors. The paper studies one such example, the Jessen icosahedron. The conclusion is that ``rather negligible variations of the lengths of the edges of the Jessen icosahexdron lead to significant variations of the spatial shapes''. The authors find a second phenomenon as well, where faces break into two along a straight line, where this line is extremely close to a boundary segment, deceiving a human observer. The authors suspect that similar explanations exist for all model flexors.
scientific article; zbMATH DE number 6619592