from the Preface

Buckminster Fuller has been alternately hailed as the most innovative thinker of our time and dismissed as an incomprehensible maverick, but there is a consistent thread running through all the wildly disparate reactions. One point about which there is little disagreement is the difficulty of understanding Bucky. "It was great! What did he say?" is the oft-repeated joke, describing the reaction of a typical enraptured listener after one of Fuller's lectures.

Check out the Buckminster Fuller FAQ by Christopher J. Fearnley

In October 2004,  SNEC's Chris Fearnly began selecting, posting and periodically updating a collection of  "Buckminster Fuller In The News" articles which discuss Fuller or related subjects (geodesic domes, synergetics, fullerene chemistry, etc). Some articles highlight people who were influenced by Fuller but otherwise do not discuss Fuller or his work. Great work and many thanks Chris!
» click here to see the latest updates

Geodesic Discussion Forum

I developed this course to teach and explore the concepts and ideas of SYNERGETICS, the energetic geometry advanced by the revolutionary thinker R. Buckminster Fuller.

Packinon is a suite of programs written by Adrian Rossiter for the generation, manipulation, and visualisation of point distributions and polyhedra.



A compound of a cube and octahedron



An icosahelix


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HOUSTON, Texas, Oct. 31



Nobel laureate Richard Smalley, co-discoverer of the buckyball and widely considered to be one of the fathers of nanotechnology, died Friday at the age of 62 after a long battle with cancer.

Rice University professor Smalley shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry with fellow Rice chemist Robert Curl and British chemist Sir Harold Kroto for the 1985 discovery of a new form of carbon nicknamed buckyballs. Shaped like soccerballs and no wider than a strand of DNA, buckyballs each contain 60 carbon atoms arranged in a hollow sphere resembling two conjoined geodesic domes. Smalley coined the name "buckminsterfullerene" for the discovery in honor of architect and geodesic dome inventor Buckminster Fuller.

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Synergetics Collaborative

The Synergetics Collaborative (originally, Synergeticists of the NorthEast Corridor or SNEC) was founded in 2002 as an organization to bring together a diverse group of people with an interest in Synergetics in face-to-face workshops, symposia, seminars, pow-wows, and other ad-hoc or planned meetings to better understand the many facets of Synergetics, its methods and principles.

SNEC was originally intended to be a geographically narrow initiative in the NorthEast Corridor of the North American continent. But our meetings have been attended by people from Japan, California, Oregon, Minnesota and Florida. Many of our current membership are anxious to expand the geographic boundaries to include the larger world community. Our public meetings are open to anybody who wants to learn more about Synergetics. We are in the process of establishing a non-profit educational organizational structure for SNEC.

The C60 molecule

This article was first published in The Chemical Intelligencer, July, 1995 (Vol. 1, No. 3), edited by Istvan Hargittai (Institute of General and Analytical Chemistry, Budapest Technical University) and published by Springer-Verlag New York Inc.

Systematic chemical nomenclature has always been corrupted - or enhanced, depending on your point of view - by the prevalence of eponyms. The fact that C₆₀ was named buckminsterfullerene could be construed as (a) an erratic departure from the etiquette of attributing discoveries to individuals (b) trivial, or (c) the validation of an intuitive vision of a designer of geodesic domes. H.W. Kroto said that the newly discovered carbon cage molecule was named buckminsterfullerene "because the geodesic ideas associated with the constructs of Buckminster Fuller had been instrumental in arriving at a plausible structure" [1]. It is becoming, in Fuller's case, that he made no claim; the honor was bestowed by others.

The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai once described naming as "the primary cultural activity," the crucial first step anyone must take before embarking on thought. John Stuart Mill declared that "The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own."

C 36 molecule

Physicists Charles Piskoti and Alex Zettl, along with chemist Jeff Yarger, of the University of California, Berkeley, reported in June 25.1998 issue of Nature that they isolated a smaller fullerene sphere that contains just 36 carbon atoms.

COSMIC HIERARCHY of Omniinterrationally-phased, Nuclear-centered, Convergently-divergently Intertransformable Systems
(colors reversed)

Click here to view all color plates for Synergetics

Copyright © 1997 Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

C 60 Molecule

Buckyball Found in Nature

Buckyballs have been found in a piece of the 4.6-billion-year-old Allende meteorite that landed in Mexico in 1969. Scientists hope that this first evidence of Buckyballs appearing in nature may provide clues to the origin of life. The Carbon 60 molecules, shaped like a geodesic sphere, were first synthesized in laboratories in 1985. This is now the third form of pure carbon known to exist naturally (along with graphite and diamonds).

still from 'Synergy' video file

excerpt from guide: Figure 5.6: 4v T-Octahedron: Final Design

Click to view the Practical Guide to Tensegrity Design by Robert William Burkhardt, Jr. / 2nd Edition © 2005 R. William Burkhardt, Jr.