It wasn't until 1855, when Charles Goodyear patented vulcanized rubber, that soccer balls started taking shape. Literally.

Most people know that a traditional soccer ball ... standard soccer ball, a spherical polyhedron made up of 12 (traditionally black) pentagons and 20 (traditionally white) hexagons, is an object ...

Picture a soccer ball and the image that comes to mind is probably a sphere made up of 32 smooth panels – 12 black pentagons and 20 white hexagons. But this conventional ball is oh so passe.

Traditionally, the pentagons are colored black and the hexagons white. A truncated octahedron. This soccer ball is modeled on a geometric shape called a truncated icosahedron, which has 60 vertices.

The typical soccer ball looks like this. Black and white with a bunch of these panels ... the Epcot Center shape, 20 hexagons, the 12 pentagons. And that was a very good approximation to a ...

adidas developed a soccer ball based on shapes from Ancient Greek arithmetic: the Telstar ball was formed of 12 black pentagons and 20 white hexagons, stitched together in a perfect circle.