Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 10, 1993 TAG: 9308250312
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A: You didn't say ``box.'' Please, tell us you didn't say ``box.'' That's what a hat comes in, or a bomb, or the head of the intransigent movie producer who refuses to give your client a starring role.
There's a more scientific, if rather ghastly, word: Parallelepiped. The last two syllables are pronounced PIE-pud. Our brand-new Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary says it is a ``6-faced polyhedron all of whose faces are parallelograms lying in pairs of parallel planes.''
Parallelepipeds and cubes and pyramids are all polyhedrons (or, for the ascot-wearing crowd, ``polyhedra''), which are solids ``formed by plane faces.'' A three-dimensional triangle would most accurately be called a tetrahedron; you could get away with calling it a pyramid, but as a general rule a pyramid is a five-sided polyhedron with a square base.
The problem with the word parallelepiped, as you no doubt have already determined, is that it does not require that the object have right-angled corners. It doesn't have to be perfectly, uh, boxy. It can be squashed. Build a box, sit on it, and it still could be a parallelepiped even if it's no longer a rectangular solid.
So let's figure this out. If you were asked to describe the shape of a piece of Bazooka Joe bubble gum, you would never say it's a parallelepiped. You'd get stomped by schoolyard thugs. You could say ``rectangular solid,'' but somehow that seems wordy.
``You could call it a box,'' Donald Albers, associate executive director of the Mathematical Association of America, told us. ``Actually, in the higher reaches of mathematics, a box is a well-defined term.''
He found a definition in a mathematics dictionary: ``A set in n-dimensional space consisting of the n-fold Cartesian product of intervals of the form. ...'' and so on, including some figures not included on any newspaper computer keyboard we've ever seen.
\ Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB