Stella (software)

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Screenshot from Great Stella software, showing the stellation diagram and net for the compound of five tetrahedra

Screenshot from Stella4D, looking at the truncated tesseract in perspective and its net, truncated cube cells hidden.

Stella, a computer program available in three versions (Great Stella, Small Stella and Stella4D) was created by Robert Webb of Australia. The programs contain a large library of polyhedra which can be manipulated and altered in various ways.

Polyhedra in Great Stella's library include the Platonic Solids, the Archimedean solids, the Kepler-Poinsot solids, the Johnson solids, some Johnson Solid near-misses, numerous compounds including the uniform polyhedra, and other polyhedra too numerous to list here. Operations which can be performed on these polyhedra include stellation, faceting, augmentation, dualization (also called "reciprocation"), creating convex hulls, and others.

All versions of the program enable users to print nets for polyhedra. These nets may then be assembled into actual three-dimensional polyhedral models of great beauty and complexity.

In 2007, a Stella4D version was added, allowing the generation and display of four dimensional polytopes (polychora), including a library of all convex uniform polychora, and all currently known nonconvex star polychora, as well as the uniform duals. They can be selected from a library or generated from user created polyhedral vertex figure files.

[edit] Release history[1]

• v1.0 - 20th August 2001 - First release of Stella
• v2.0 - 12th September 2002
• v3.0 - 12th June 2005
  • v3.5 - 16th March 2006
    • v3.5.1 - 10th May 2006
• v4.0 - 13th March 2007 - newest version (Including new "Stella4D")
  • v4.1 - 24th March 2007
  • v4.2 - 27th June 2007
  • v4.3 - 2nd November 2007
  • v4.4 - 11th January 2008

[edit] External links

• Stella homepage
  • Stella: Polyhedron Navigator (Paper published in Symmetry: Culture and Science, Volume 11, Numbers 1-4, 231-268, 2000[2])
  • Stella Models (Paper published in Symmetry: Culture and Science, Volume 13, Numbers 3-4, 391-399, 2002[3])
• Stella (Great and small) - Robert Webb THE MATH FORUM INTERNET NEWS: 26 November 2001
• software.techrepublic.com.com Great Stella (exe)
• www.cut-the-knot.org Stella - Polyhedron Navigator Great Stella is by far the most comprehensive tool around for exploring the fascinating world of polyhedra.
• MathGrasper poster: Polygons and Polyhedra (Educational poster created with Stella images)