This photo shows fusion of my two favourite things — maths and football. This football is a truncated icosahedron, an Archimedean solid, and a world famous shape. Tessellated with 32 faces - 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons — it has 60 vertices and 90 edges. It isn’t the only way to tessellate a football, but it is the classic. You could also use irregular pentagons and triangles, like the World Cup ball. The net is made from tessellating squares and is attached to the cylindrical goal posts, which in turn angulate into triangles and rectangles. Football really is a game of shapes. And that’s just the start of its connection to maths.
