Wheeler’s more ingenious plane dissections involved polyhedra, cut into smaller polyhedra, that could then be rearranged to form other polyhedra. He and his students first made these models of paper.

Besides the regular and semiregular solids, there are just ninety-two other convex polyhedra with regular faces. In 1966, the American mathematician Norman W. Johnson, a student of H.S.M. Coxeter at ...