Henry Segerman is a mathematician at the University of Melbourne with a keen interest in 3d-printing mathematical shapes. He’s just uploaded a video showing off his latest creation, a 30-cell burr puzzle created in collaboration with Saul Schleimer:
[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJwqT_sbB_A]
Pretty cool, eh?
As well as providing a PDF describing the puzzle, Henry’s uploaded the design to Shapeways so you can have your very own copy to play with.
Earlier this year, Henry and Saul’s half 120- and 600-cells won the “Best Use of Mathematics” award at the 2012 Bridges Conference.
More information
30-Cell Puzzle on Shapeways
These interlocking rings of dodecahedra can be explained by either thinking of the dodecahedra as icosians (a multiplicative group of 120 Hamiltonian quaternions) or as a discrete version of the Hopf fibration:
http://cp4space.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/good-fibrations/