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Polyhedra, by Peter Cromwell, is not going to be a wildly popular book,
though it is about things we see everyday in nature, art, buildings—even
in the world’s most popular sport where a football is a polyhedron. As objects,
the beauty of polyhedra can be striking, as a glance at the colour plates
reveals. Their history, from ancient Greece and Egypt on, involves theories of
space and light, geometry, astronomy, the invention of artificial perspective
and, of course, mathematics. Nonmathematicians will still find plenty to
fascinate. Published by CUP, £30, ISBN 0521554322.