Platonic solid to that of a sphere of the same size (i.e. either the same surface area or the same volume.) The dodecahedron, on the other hand, has the smallest angular defect, the largest vertex solid angle, and it fills out its circumscribed sphere the most. Every polyhedron has a dual (or "polar") polyhedron with faces and vertices interchanged. The dual of every Platonic solid is another Platonic solid, so that we can arrange the five solids into dual pairs. If a polyhedron has Schläfli symbol {"p", "q"}, then its dual has the symbol {"q", "p"}. Indeed, every combinatorial property of one
Solid angle of a planar triangle is equal to "", for the sum of the four internal solid angles of a tetrahedron as follows: where ranges over all six of the dihedral angles between any two planes that contain the tetrahedral faces OAB, OAC, OBC and ABC. A useful formula for calculating the solid angle subtended by the triangular surface ABC where formula_17 are the vector positions of the vertices A, B and C has been given by Oosterom and Strackee (although the result was known earlier by Euler and Lagrange): where denotes the scalar triple product of the three vectors; When