Hexagon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In geometry, a hexagon is a polygon with six edges and six vertices. Its Schläfli symbol is {6}.

The internal angles of a regular hexagon (one where all sides and all angles are equal) are all 120° and the hexagon has 720 degrees. It has 6 lines of symmetry.. Like squares and equilateral triangles, regular hexagons fit together without any gaps to tile the plane (three hexagons meeting at every vertex), and so are useful for constructing tessellations. The cells of a beehive honeycomb are hexagonal for this reason and because the shape makes efficient use of space and building materials. The Voronoi diagram of a regular triangular lattice is the honeycomb tessellation of hexagons.

The area of a regular hexagon of side length is given by

The circumference of a hexagon of side length is, of course, , its maximal diameter , and its minimal diameter .

There is no platonic solid made of regular hexagons. The archimedean solids with some hexagonal faces are the truncated tetrahedron, truncated octahedron, truncated icosahedron (of soccer ball and fullerene fame), truncated cuboctahedron and the truncated icosidodecahedron.

In French, the term l'hexagone (the hexagon) is often used as a nickname for France, since the country is shaped somewhat like a hexagon.

Contents 1 Hexagon construction 2 Hexagon by man and nature 3 External links 4 See also

[edit] Hexagon construction

A regular hexagon is constructible with compass and straightedge. The following is a step-by-step animated method of this, given by Euclid's Elements, Book IV, Proposition 15.

[edit] Hexagon by man and nature

An aerial view of Fort Jefferson in Dry Tortugas National Park	A beehive honeycomb	The scutes of a turtle's carapace	North polar hexagonal cloud feature on Saturn, discovered by Voyager 1 and confirmed in 2006 by Cassini [1] [2] [3]
Micrograph of a snowflake	Cyrstal structure of a molecular hexagon composed of hexagonal aromatic rings reported by Müllen and cooworkers in Chem. Eur. J., 2000, 1834-1839.

[edit] External links

• Definition and properties of a hexagon With interactive animation
• Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn
• Saturn's Strange Hexagon
• A hexagonal feature around Saturn's North Pole
• "Bizarre Hexagon Spotted on Saturn" - from Space.com (27 March 2007)

[edit] See also

• hexagonal number

Polygons
Triangle • Quadrilateral • Pentagon •Hexagon • Heptagon • Octagon • Enneagon (Nonagon) • Decagon • Hendecagon • Dodecagon • Triskaidecagon • Pentadecagon • Hexadecagon • Heptadecagon • Enneadecagon • Icosagon • Chiliagon • Myriagon