Combinatorics – How Many Sewings Are on a Soccer Ball?

algebra-precalculuscombinatoricscontest-mathpolyhedra

A soccer ball is obtained by sewing $20$ hexagonal pieces of leather and $12$ pieces of leather of pentagonal shape.

A sewing joins together the sides of two adjacent pieces. How many sewings are there ?

enter image description here

My effort

I was able to solve this problem by realizing that if I count the number of sewings adjacent to the hexagons and the ones adjacent to the pentagons I will be counting each sewing twice.

So, the number of sewings is $$\cfrac{120 + 60}{2}=90.$$

Second Approach (this is the one I am asking about)

If we count the sewings adjacent to the pentagons we have $12 \cdot 5 =60 $ sewings ,now to count the rest of the sewings I just observe that any other sewing starts at the edge of some pentagon,so I have $60$ other sewings,for a total of $120$ sewings .

However this doesn't quite work, but if I look at the picture I have posted above it seems to be correct as I don't have any pentagon sharing a sewing with another pentagon.

What am I missing?

Best Answer

The issue is that the picture depicts not the conventional soccer ball (a truncated icosahedron) but rather something a little different, the chamfered dodecahedron, also known as a truncated rhombic triacontahedron. This actually does have 120 edges.

enter image description here

So, in a sense, you were right both times, but just thinking about different polyhedra!


It's interesting to note that these are both examples of Goldberg Polyhedra, polyhedra made from only pentagons and hexagons -- although the faces are not necessarily regular (and in the chamfered dodecahedron, they are not).