The Platonic Solids are often used as dice in role-playing games.
There are a lot of uses for Platonic solids, but some of the main reasons are:the shapes are often used to makedice, because dice of these shapes can be made fair. 6-sided dice are very common, but the other numbers are commonly used inrole-playing games. Such dice are commonly referred to as D followed by the number of faces (d8, d20 etc.).
The tetrahedron (4 sided), cube (6 sided), and octahedron (8 sided), are found naturally incrystal structures. The dodecahedron (12 sides) is combinatorially identical to thepyritohedron (in that both have twelve pentagonal faces), which is one of the possible crystal structures ofpyrite. However, the pyritohedron is not a regular dodecahedron, but rather has the same symmetry as the cube.
Inmeteorology andclimatology, global numerical models of atmospheric flow are of increasing interest which use grids that are based on an icosahedron (20 sides,refined bytriangulation) instead of the more commonly usedlongitude/latitude grid. This has the advantage of better spatial resolution withoutsingularities (i.e. thepoles) at the expense of somewhat greater numerical difficulty.
Geometry ofspace frames is often based on Platonic solids.
