A professor at Florida Tech tried to explain to his freshmen students about the intricacies of his favorite shape, the rhombicosidodecahedron.

Thomas Marcinkowski, professor and program chair of mathematical sciences, began his Thursday lecture last week by introducing the subject of Archimedean solids.

“Archimedean solids are semi-regular convex polyhedra composed of regular polygons meeting in identical vertices, excluding the five Platonic solids, which are composed of only one type of polygon, and excluding the prisms and antiprisms of course,” Marcinkowski said to a crowd of slack-jawed freshmen students staring at him. “But I’m sure you’ll all agree with me that the rhombicosidodecahedron is by far the most interesting of these solids. That non-prismatic little bugger, you can bet he’ll be on the next test.”

The students attending Marcinkowski’s class knew he was passionate about mathematics but did not expect such advanced mathematical concepts to be presented in a freshmen level course.

“What in the hell is he even talking about? I only just wrapped my head around using letters as numbers,” said one visibly sweating freshman. “Is this really on the test? I can’t even spell that roomba-cosign-dude-ah-hedron thing. This course was listed as a pre-req for Calculus One for God’s sake. Why are there no tutors?”

Caught in a zen-like trance brought on by the intensity of his mathematics and unaware of his students’ confusion, Marcinkowski continued to feverishly explain the idiosyncrasies of his favorite shape.

“If you expand an icosahedron by moving the faces away from the origin by just the right amount, without changing the orientation or size of the faces mind you, and do the same to its dual dodecahedron, and patch the square holes in the result, you get a rhombicosidodecahedron. Isn’t that just awesome?” Marcinkowski said. “You can even represent it as a spherical tilling and project it onto a plane via stereographic projection if you want to get nasty. Of course, that projection would be conformal; Only preserving the angles and not the areas or lengths. But that goes without saying.”