Ornament and lampshade

Abstract

This object is a spherical version of the geometric Flower of Life, made into a lighting cover or ornament. The Flower of Life is a religious symbol, a flat, sacred geometric pattern consisting of six overlapping circles that form six petals. While the six petals can be considered hexagons, a sphere cannot be created using only hexagons (see Euler's Polyhedron Theorem), so other shapes (pentagons), like a soccer ball, must also be included. While this object does contain some pentagons, its number is extremely limited. Specifically, the sphere is a 122-sided polygon, with 110 hexagons and only 12 pentagons (for comparison, a soccer ball is a 32-sided polygon with 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons). This maximizes the number of petals, allowing the human eye to perceive the Flower of Life as a sphere. *The 122-sided solid is the total number of faces when it is a sphere. When it is used as a light source, the bottom part of the sphere is hollowed out, so the total number of faces is reduced by that amount.

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