S Ranganathan spent three decades of teaching and doing research at the IIT, Kanpur. He has continued these activities with equal vigour, earlier at RRL, Trivandrum and now at IICT, Hyderabad, where he is a distinguished scientist. His current fascination is with chemical biology.

We have taken the modular construction of surfaces to the complexity of an eicosahedron, which describes a surface crafted from congruence of five equilateral triangles resulting in the inscription of a pentagon motif. Taking any pairs of opposite poles, each pole will have a pentagon, with the equatorial girdle harboring ten equilateral triangles. The surface of eicosahedron, a platonic solid with twenty equilateral triangles, can be viewed as a layering of interdigitating regular pentagons.

Compare this in complexity with a geodesic dome, a surface as close to sphere as you can get. Here one perceives the congruence of twelve regular pentagons, but each constituted by 10 triangles, which are irregular (a ¹ b ¹ c), with the neighboring module aligned in a mirror image configuration!

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Address for Correspondence

Subramania Ranganathan
Discovery Laboratory
Indian Institute of Chemical Technology
Hyderabad 500 007, India.