Midsphere
sphere that is tangent to every edge of a polyhedron
In geometry, the midsphere or intersphere of a convex polyhedron is a sphere which is tangent to every edge of the polyhedron. Not every polyhedron has a midsphere, but the uniform polyhedra, including the regular, quasiregular and semiregular polyhedra and their duals (Catalan solids) all have midspheres. The radius of the midsphere is called the midradius. A polyhedron that has a midsphere is said to be midscribed about this sphere.
When a polyhedron has a midsphere, one can form two perpendicular circle packings on the midsphere, one corresponding to the adjacencies between vertices of the polyhedron, and the other corresponding in the same way to its polar polyhedron, which has the same midsphere. The length of each polyhedron edge is the sum of the distances from its two endpoints to their corresponding circles in this circle packing.
Every convex polyhedron has a combinatorially equivalent polyhedron, the canonical polyhedron, that does have a midsphere, centered at the centroid of the points of tangency of its edges. Numerical approximation algorithms can construct the canonical polyhedron, but its coordinates cannot be represented exactly as a closed-form expression. Any canonical polyhedron and its polar dual can be used to form two opposite faces of a four-dimensional antiprism.
Definition and examples
A midsphere of a three-dimensional convex polyhedron is defined to be a sphere that is tangent to every edge of the polyhedron.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1477369. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Midsphere” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.