Peabodies of Constant Width

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe a new $3$-dimensional family of bodies of constant width that we have called peabodies, obtained from the Reuleaux tetrahedron by replacing a small neighborhood of all six edges with sections of an envelope of spheres. This family contains, in particular, the two Meissner solids and a body with tetrahedral symmetry that we have called Robert's body. Behind the construction of this family lies the classical notion of confocal quadrics discussed, for example, by Hilbert in his famous book. We study confocal quadrics and prove that the distances of an alternating sequence of four points in two confocal quadrics always satisfies a simple equation and use this equation to prove that our bodies have constant width.