figures for a body of rotating homogeneous self-gravitating fluid. However, while the Jacobi ellipsoid spins bodily, with no internal flow of the fluid in the rotating frame, the Dedekind ellipsoid maintains a fixed orientation, with the constituent fluid circulating within it. This is a direct consequence of Dedekind's theorem.

For any given Jacobi ellipsoid, there exists a Dedekind ellipsoid with the same semi-principal axes and same mass and with a flow velocity field