To start our exploration of solid shapes we use just one kind of regular polygon and put the same number of them around every corner (vertex). This leads to 5 shapes:
These are called the Platonic Solids in honour of the Greek mathematician Plato, who wrote a paper about them in 360BC – though in fact they were already well known before his time. And we give them names based from Plato’s language: hedron means a face or a side, and poly means any number of, so we refer to these shapes together as Polyhedrons, or Polyhedra.
It turns out there are only 5 Regular (Platonic) solids in total: there just aren’t any more. But if we relax the rules a bit this gets us to The 13 Semi-Regular (Archimedean) Solids