Wheeler’s more ingenious plane dissections involved polyhedra, cut into smaller polyhedra, that could then be rearranged to form other polyhedra. He and his students first made these models of paper.

The top and bottom faces of this model are regular pentagons and the side faces include pentagons, triangles, and squares. The total number of faces includes thirty-five equilateral triangles, five ...

Five years later, he published his first book on polyhedrons, "Polyhedron Models for the Classroom," which has been reprinted six times — including in Spanish — for a total of 52,000 copies.