Ok here is a good question why do soccer balls have pentegon patches, and baseball has two stiches, and basketball have the black stripes? is it for a reason or do they just do it to tell the difference?
The pentagonal patches make the hexagonal ones fit together in a spheroid.
Soccer balls have pentagons because if they were made entirely of hexagons, you couldn’t make a sphere.
God was so impressed he invented Buckminsterfullerine
Baseballs (and cricket balls) are smaller and use a softer skin over a hard interior, allowing for more stretching of the skin.
Basketballs… no idea.
A baseball has more than two stitches.
However it just has two seams. The two parts of the cover of a baseball surround a core of wound thread over a rubber or cork center.
Very early basketballs had a seam on the outside like a football, but that was hard to dribble, for obvious reasons, so basketballs with inside seams were developed. The black stripes are just where the various panels of a leather (or faux leather basketball) are joined together.
I think that rubber basketballs just have the stripes on them so they look familiar.
Okaaaay, then…
Why do soccer balls have hexagonal patches?
P.S. “So the pentagonal patches will fit” is not an acceptable answer. :rolleyes:
Yes, it’s just so they can be stiched into spheres. Modern footballs (soccerballs) are made out of an inner bladder which holds the air (these days made out of rubber or a simpler synthetic material) surrounded by an outer stitched sphere of leather (usually a synthehic material nowdays), a bit like a tyre and an inner tube.
Football maufacturers use various different designs, not necessarily the classic pentagons and hexagons design.
Soccer balls are based on a truncated icosahedron, which is composed of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons. It’s one of the 13 Archimedean (semi-regular) polyhedra, and the one in which the two different surface shapes are most nearly equal in area, most closely approximating a sphere. Of course when the ball is inflated it’s basically a sphere.
A polyhedron composed only of pentagons is a dodecahedron, and is a lot “rougher” and further from a sphere than the buckminsterfullerene/soccer ball shape made of hexagons and pentagons (I knew the name of this form at one time, but I’ve forgotten it). A form made only of hexagons would, of course, be a flat plane.
I suppose you could ,ake an icosahedron, a shape with five equilateral triangles meeting at each vertex. But that’s a lot of stitching, and I suspect it wouldn’t be as strong as a soccer ball. Most of the other Platonic solids and quasi-Platonic solids made out of regular polyhedra are much further from a sphere, and wouldn’t roll in a pleasing way after you kicked them. A game played with a sewn tetrahedron would, I grant, be as interested as a kick-ball game played with an American football, though.
I’m pretty sure a baseball has one seam.
Truncated Icosahedron.
If you want to know why a soccer ball has exactly 12 pentagons, here is the straight dope. Consider a polyhedron that is constructed so that exactly three edges meet at each vertex. Suppose the number of triangles in the polyhedron is a_3, the number of quadrilaterals is a_4, the number of pentagons is a_5, heptagons is a_7, octagons is a_8 and so on, then
3a_3 + 2a_4 + a_5 - a_7 - 2a_8 - 3a_9 - … = 12
So you could have four triangles or 6 squares or 12 pentagons or 2 triangles plus 3 squares or any of these plus an arbitrary number of hexagons. If you have only pentagons and hexagons, then then the number of pentagons must be 12. As for the 20 hexagons, well that makes a nice semiregular polyhedron.
A science-fiction writer once imagined a world that was divided entirely into hexagons. By the second edition of his books, he had been apprised of the error of his ways and corrected it. Of course, you could have more than three edges meeting at some vertices, but I think that only makes it worse. Such as an octahedron with 8 triangles, 4 meeting at each vertex.
It shoudl be noted that footballs havign this shape is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the sixties a rectangular patchwork system was still in use.
You can see a lot of the different types of balls here:
I think that the question in the OP wasn’t so much about any particular ball, but why different sorts of balls have different patterns of covering. In comparing a baseball or a softball to the larger ones, I suppose it would be because of the different size or composition (wound twine inside, rather than air). But why would a soccer ball use a different covering scheme than a basketball?