Definition of Synergetics:

Synergetics is Fuller's name for the geometry he advanced based on the patterns of energy that he saw in nature.

For him, geometry was a laboratory science with the touch and feel of physical models--not rules out of a textbook. He started with models of the closest packing of spheres. From that basic starting point he derived triangles as the most economical relationship between events.

COSMIC FISHING: An Account of writing Synergetics with Buckminster Fuller. by E.J. Applewhite. Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., New York, c1977 hardback.

E.J. Applewhite on Synergetics

In his efforts to clarify the meaning and importance of synergetics , E.J. Applewhite Jr. stands second to none -- except, of course, Bucky himself. What Ed says on synergetics is source material, and his contribution to the subject cannot be overstated.

Albert Einstein

Excerpts from R. Buckminster Fuller's book Cosmography

In his daring concept of universal evolution as constant motion, as put forth and written into (unwitting) poetry by Einstein, we have then the greatest conceptioning and greatest communication by a human being to other human beings not only in the 20th Century but possibly in any other of the centuries. Therefore I see that Einstein is certainly the great artist of the 20th Century. Einstein becomes the prototype scientist-artist of the not only the 20th Century but of the now looming 21st Century.*

Color sketch of the Jitterbug Transformation (1948)

"The difference between synergetics and conventional mathematics is that it is derived from experience and is always considerate of experience, whereas conventional mathematics is based upon 'axioms' that were imaginatively conceived and inconsiderate of information progressively harvested through microscope, telescopes, and electronic probings into the non-sensorially tunable ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum."

  —RBF to EJA, Somerset Club, Boston, 22 April 1971 From the Synergetics Dictionary

Revised for 2005 by Bob Burkhardt


Upon my completion of my initial reading of Buckminster Fuller's two Synergetics books
(Synergetics, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1975, and Synergetics 2, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1979), or perhaps in the middle of that reading, I conceived a great interest in tensegrity structures and the mathematics involved in designing them. Bucky's idea of building a dome big enough to cover an entire city had a certain fascination for me as well.

The revolutionary architect-engineer's own patent revelation about his basic structurial discoveries



Architect, engineer and cosmologist R. Buckminster Fuller and [Following] three of his basic structures: Tensegrity mast, Geodesic dome, octet truss in the Fuller exhibition, Modern Museum, N.Y.
Note from Robert Gray:

This paper appeared in Portfolio and Art News Annual, No.4, 1961. In addition to this article there is an accompanying Introduction by John McHale.