Investigating the Formulas and Structure of Adding Borders in Three Dimensions

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Investigating the Formulas and Structure of Adding Borders in Three Dimensions

Now that I have completed my investigation into adding borders in two

dimensions and its structure, I will now investigate the formulas and

structure of adding borders in three dimensions. I have made the first

five patterns using cubes and to make it simpler to draw I have split

the shapes up into layers.

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6

By Yousuf Khan

I put the diagrams of the 3D cubes as layers so that if you layer them

together you will get the shape you want. This makes my job of

counting much easier so I decided to draw them in this way. Now I will

count up the cubes and put the information into a table of results.

Pattern Number

3D Border Cubes

3D Inside Cubes

3D Total Cubes

1

0

1

1

2

6

1

7

3

18

7

25

4

38

25

63

5

66

63

129

From viewing the table I can see that one of the patterns is still the

same, and that is, that the total number of cubes in pattern number 1

is equal to the inside cubes in pattern number 2, and the total number

of cubes in pattern number 2 is equal to the inside number of cubes

for pattern number 3 etc. Also the total number of cubes minus the

border cubes gives me the Inside cubes.

I shall now work out some formulae for working out the number of

inside cubes, the total number of cubes and the border cubes for the

3D shapes.

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If we ignore the first of the 2nd differences, we begin to see a

pattern which, although may not have any relevance, could still mean

something.

[IMAGE] So it has something to do with 4n².

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