Files
kennethreitz ce93f429a2 Add Knowledge: the vault's reference shelf, crosslinked across the site
Publish the Obsidian vault's Knowledge folder as /knowledge (881 notes,
67 folders), with a Knowledge item in the nav and footer.

- scripts/import_knowledge.py regenerates data/knowledge from the vault:
  slugged paths, folder notes as index pages, wikilinks resolved to site
  links (or plain text), callouts, highlights, and Dataview tables
  rendered statically. Personal notes are withheld via an exclusion
  list plus a privacy guard.
- tuftecms/core/knowledge.py builds a concept index from note titles and
  aliases. First mentions on ordinary pages link to their Knowledge note
  (capped, never in headings, code, links, or sidenotes); Knowledge pages
  list related notes and where they're mentioned across the site; other
  pages get a Related Knowledge block.
- Knowledge URLs join sitemap.xml (so the sweep test covers them), never
  displace existing legacy slugs, list alphabetically, and mermaid
  diagrams render client-side only on pages that have them.
2026-10-18 20:08:46 -04:00

2.3 KiB

description, source
description source
Twenty faces rounding toward the sphere — form that flows and will not hold an edge. obsidian-knowledge

Icosahedron

Twenty faces rounding toward the sphere — form that flows and will not hold an edge.


The Form

The icosahedron is the most many-faced of the triangular solids, twenty equilateral triangles gathered five to a vertex around twelve points. Of all the Platonic solids it comes nearest to the sphere, its densely tiled surface rounding away the hard corners that mark the simpler forms. Roll it and it very nearly rolls; hold it and it fills the hand with a sense of smoothness and yield. Its abundance of faces gives it a fluid, almost liquid character, as though it were a drop of the ideal caught momentarily in facets.

The icosahedron is the dual of the dodecahedron, the two most complex solids paired as reciprocals in the way the cube and octahedron are paired. Where the dodecahedron gathers space into twelve broad pentagons, the icosahedron scatters it into twenty keen triangles, and each contains the other in the arithmetic of their vertices and faces. It is the last of the four elemental bodies, and the roundest, the one whose geometry most readily suggests flowing rather than standing.

Correspondences

Attribute Value
Faces 20
Face shape Equilateral triangle
Edges 30
Vertices 12
Element Water
Dual Dodecahedron

Meaning

Plato assigned the icosahedron to Water, and its rounded, flowing form makes the choice feel natural. Water is the element that takes the shape of its vessel, that moves and pools and yields, and the icosahedron, nearest of the solids to the fluid sphere, embodies that pliancy. In Alchemy Water is the solvent and the dissolver, the medium in which the fixed is loosened and made ready for change, the maternal element of gestation and flow. The icosahedron thus stands for adaptability, emotion, and the receptive current, the geometry of that which conforms without breaking. To contemplate it is to feel how the greatest complexity can arrive at the greatest smoothness.