ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Tetrahedron

Hi there, I'm happy to explain what a tetrahedron is!

A tetrahedron is a special shape that has four sides. Can you imagine a triangle that is standing up and has another triangle connected to the bottom of it? Now, imagine doing that three more times around the first triangle, which creates a 3D shape. That's what a tetrahedron is! It's like a pyramid with a triangle as its base, but it has four sides instead of three.

Each of the four sides of a tetrahedron is called a face. If you touch two faces together, they make an edge. An edge is where two faces of the tetrahedron meet. If you touch three edges together at the same point, that's called a vertex. A vertex is the pointy parts of the tetrahedron where the edges meet.

The cool thing about a tetrahedron is that it's one of the simplest 3D shapes you can make. It also has some important properties like being symmetrical - which means it looks the same from all angles - and it has a center point called a centroid. This shape is found in many real-life objects such as crystals, molecular structures, and pyramids.

So, there you have it! A tetrahedron is a shape with four sides, where each side is a triangle. It also has edges, which are where the triangles meet, and vertices, which are the pointy parts of the shape where three edges meet.