Applied mathematicians love parallelepipeds. The one I share my office with is always drawing them, and banging on about how great they are. Well, I think I know just what to get him for Christmas.
Hopson Kinetic has, for reasons only they can know, made a plastic parallelepiped toy called Prismatoy. It’s constructed from “72 individual jointed parts” and is roughly the size of a stack of floppy disks. The slogan is, “What shapes will you find?” Without having played with one, I’m going to go with “a variously sheared cube”.
It’s $14.99, and comes in orange, green or blue flavours. The site says “international shipping is currently unavailable”, which I assume means they won’t deliver outside the US.
Online shop: Hopson Kinetic
I once tried to hone a student’s English pronunciation by having her say ‘yellow parallelogram, purple parallelopiped’ repeatedly. Don’t think it worked.