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60 carbon atoms are bonded in a cage of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons, forming what is known as the Truncated Icosahedron, one of the 13 Archimedian “solids”. Most people recognize this shape as the shape of a soccer ball, but it also happens to be the shape of c60, a new allotrope of carbon discovered in 1985. This cage of carbon atoms has come to be known as a “Bucky Ball” or “buckminsterfullerene” because of Buckminster Fuller’s influence on the scientists who discovered it - Kroto, Curl and Smalley - who went on to win the Nobel prize in 1996 for their discovery.

C60 is found throughout the cosmos, from nebulae to stars and has been generated in a lab through laser-evaporation of graphite. This arc-generated soot has been touted as being a very stable cage structure that can be harder than diamond, is hydrophobic, and has potential uses in medicine, cosmetics, nanotechnology, and photovoltaics among other fields of study.

“The carbon in our body originated in space. Indeed, we now know that it was ejected from some star a long, long time ago and then was reprocessed and ended up on the Earth’s biosphere. What is absolutely fascinating and certainly something that excited me when I first discovered it, is that every one of us is made of carbon, therefore every one of us is made of stardust... “One thing they are not so sure of is what is the form of that dust, what is the structure. How does the carbon nucleate to form these that form these little wudges that go on to grow into planets?”

-Harold Kroto

Graphene and carbon nanotubes are two more examples of Carbon discoveries that shook up the science world and sparked deeper interest in nano materials. Graphene is a single-atom-thick Hexagonal lattice of carbon while carbon nanotubes are essentially graphene rolled into tubes. The potential of these strong nano materials is being explored in medicine, photovoltaics, batteries, electronics, and many other fields of study. These newly discovered materials are great examples of how nature self-organizes into simple geometric relationships that exhibit the highest structural integrity while accomplishing diverse life-support solutions, using minimum energy.

“Carbon has an incredible ability to spontaneously assemble to form these objects. That’s what we really discovered. The more we think about that, and how neat these objects are, the more we are beginning to realize that we can find ways of tricking nature in to self assembling carbon into other fullerene-like shapes as well, and that these new materials may well have major practical as well as theoretical significance. “In fact, it emerges that buckyball was (and is) a sort of Rosetta Stone of what we now realize is an infinity of new structures made of carbon one way or another. . . And the deciphering of the C60 Rosetta Stone has led us to start dreaming of all sorts of new structures that truly are geodesic architecture on a nanometer scale, and to scheme about how to make them.”

- Richard Smalley “From Tubes to Ropes”

Buckminster Fuller wrote Synergetics 1 & 2 as an exploration in the geometry of thinking; a discovery of nature’s coordinate system and the patterns of integrity that humans could employ for greater life support using less energy. In a passage from Synergetics, written years before the discovery of c60, Fuller nearly prophesizes his recognition in Buckminsterfullerene:

SOURCES:

Synergetics 1 & 2 by Buckminster Fuller

http://rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/toc/toc.html

Bonnie Devarco’s “Invisible Architecture”

https://members.cruzio.com/~devarco/invisible.htm

The applications of buckminsterfullerene C60 and derivatives in orthopaedic research

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4124742/

Buckminsterfullerene

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/buckminsterfullerene

Graphene’s Structure, Synthesis and Characterization; a brief review

https://ejchem.journals.ekb.eg/article_51892_b9ae68491ff6db0ac59da6011629c527.pdf

GRAPHENE: THE COOLEST MATERIAL THAT SHOULDN’T EXIST

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2011/graphene-the-coolest-material-that-shouldnt-exist/

Graphene image from MDPI:

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/4/2/267

987.033
Synergetics progressively divides and progressively discovers the omnirational tetrahedral-related volumes and the other topological and angular characteristics of the great-circle-spun, hemisystem cleavages and their respective fractionation resultants. This progressive synergetic division and discovery describes the entire primitive hierarchy …

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There was a buzz in the air as I got out of the van after the two hour ride from Lambert International in St. Louis. As fate would have it, Mark Smith from the Design Science Studio (DSS) was on the same flight as me and he graciously offered me a seat in his shuttle to Carbondale.

We happened to pull up just in time for Ari Lazer and Roxi Shohadaee from DSS to greet us out front of the Airbnb, embracing with a warmth that felt good after a long day of travel. They welcomed us through the side gate to the pool house and the adjacent rooms we would be staying in, where I had the pleasure to meet more of the DSS crew, Eve and Mage.

Within an hour, we were eating hors d'oeuvres and drinking wine under the big tree next to the pool with the hosts of the property and a large group of people associated with the weeks festivities.

I knew that Fuller had taught at SIU Carbondale and that his original dome home was somewhere nearby, but it hadn’t occurred to me that Bucky was still a prominent figure in this small college town. The garden party participants, many of whom were locals, shared stories of Bucky and we learned that he had swam in the pool we partied next to as well as held one of the attendees in his arms when she was a baby.

The tree glowed as Thomas Zung, an architect who worked closely with Fuller in the 70s, stood up and gave a short speech about his writings, his relationship with Bucky and the tremendous week we had ahead of us. You see, we were all in town for the Fuller Futures Festival, a four day event on the SIU Campus as well as at the Fuller Dome Home Museum.

We were an eclectic group of people with diverse skills and careers, from city council members to architects, materials scientists, engineers, artists and designers of all kinds. I finally had the pleasure of meeting Kurt Przybilla and Patricia Ravasio in person after years of collaboration and friendship online; we each spoke briefly about our work on the impromptu tree stage.

Elizabeth Donoghue, the Assistant Director of the Honors Program at SIU, led the Fuller Futures event here in Carbondale for 2026 after the very fruitful 2025 event in Edwardsville at the Fuller Dome with Benjamin Lowder. She closed our circle with some inspired words that gave us all hope in the future of design science on campuses.

Finding someone who knows of Buckminster Fuller is rare these days, so to be in attendance with forty or so members of a community that were not only interested in this work, but also worked with Fuller in some cases, was highly encouraging. I couldn’t help but feel emboldened by the strong undercurrent of design scientists, artists, engineers, architects, and lifelong learners that are curious about Fuller’s call to make the world work for everyone.

Just as I thought the party was ending, there was a procession onto the street and we all walked a few blocks to Bucky’s Dome home. I had no idea we were so close to the dome that Fuller lived in, so this impromptu parade was a delightful surprise. The dome is much smaller than I expected and before I knew it, we were crossing the threshold to its inside. Of course Elizabeth and Mike Chervinko happened to be board members of the Fuller Dome Home Museum and had the keys to the dome and gave us a tour. I am so grateful for the work they are doing to preserve Fuller’s legacy in Carbondale and I look forward to their new visitors center being fully built and activated.

From the Library of Congress Historic Building entry:

This geodesic dome was the home of visionary engineer Buckminster Fuller and his wife Anne. It illustrates his architectural philosophy and was the only dome his family lived in or owned anywhere in the world. Six of Fuller’s patents were issued with this address and, reportedly, twelve of his books were published during Anne and Bucky’s residence in the Dome Home.

What transpired over the next 7 days for this crew of designers of all ages1 was a cascade of insightful conversations, activities, galleries, parades and plays that dazzled the imagination and encouraged the participants to envisage an omni-integrated world that leverages more life support, using less resources.

Synergetics University was attending Fuller Futures with the support of Benjamin Lowder and the Fuller Dome at SIU Edwardsville as well as Elizabeth’s considerate programming for the festival. Their support allowed us to continue our mission of documenting this important work, creating educational resources and building relationships with inspired trimtabs.

I spent the week shooting video for our documentary about Synergetics and Design Science, capturing interviews and glimpses of the activities between my engagements. This doc aims to archive the important voices in the world of Synergetics and Design Science, so stay tuned.

THE FESTIVAL BEGINS

Medard Gabel and Thomas Zung started the festival with back-to-back presentations to a meager but mighty audience. Even with the light attendance and very few students, I felt an inspired integrity about the group that was undeniably gravitational. It felt like the growing tide before full moon and we were all surfers, cosmic fishers at dawn.

Gabel and Zung both worked closely with Fuller and are some of the most knowledgeable and historically significant people in the study of design science. It felt vitally important to witness their speeches about designing with consideration. Gabel’s speciality is Fuller’s ‘World Game’ and he told many beautiful stories about the bond he shared with Bucky. Today, he continues the work with his NewWorld Game. Thomas Zung has authored multiple books on this work, including Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the New Millennium. It was a blessing to witness these first hand accounts of Fuller’s collaborators and the passage of time felt ever more palpable as their talks came to an end.

I rushed out of the conference hall to see a group of around 25 students gathered around Kurt Przybilla between the library and another brutalist looking building on campus. They were broken into groups, each using rubber bands to secure small bamboo struts that formed miniature models of the larger bamboo structure they were about to construct. Kurt was giving instructions on how the reciprocal frame and tensegrity worked, which the students (mostly Forestry and Architecture majors) seemed to comprehend and replicate rather quickly. I had to leave before the 20 foot diameter dome was complete, but I returned later for a glimpse of the structure that would remain on campus for an undetermined amount of time (as long as possible, I hope).

I left the dome builders to film a panel with Medard Gabel, Patricia Ravasio, Nyhl Henson and Doria Cordova who shared their first hand experiences with Fuller and how it shaped their work. I did my best to remain present as I prepared for my own panel talk right after.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ilija Rasovic, a materials scientist at the University of Birmingham, and Jamey Webster, an independent researcher, for a talk about our work on Design science and Synergetics. We had a lively conversation that was full of audience questions and general probing of what Synergetics and Design Science looks like in a modern context. I felt humbled to sit with such brilliant minds as Ilija and Jamey, our talk really lit me up and gave me a feel for how rich the week was going to be.

We ended the first day with a fun and festive puppet parade through campus to a domed shelter by the lake, where a horn band played, food trucks pumped out tacos and Ari Lazer showcased his giant polyhedra lanterns. This was the perfect end to a full day of Bucky-inspired presentations and left me wondering how to cultivate more youthful enthusiasm around this work.

The Fullest Four Days : April 22–26, 2026

The week was too full for me to recount in this newsletter. I captured many snippets on film, so I will leave some of the storytelling to future content. Here’s an outline of the memorable moments from the rest of the week:

Benjamin Lowder led a World Game workshop with a large Dymaxion Map on the floor for participants to stand on. The world game was Bucky’s answer to War Gaming and its mission was:

"Make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone."

Over the span of a few hours, people had a transformative, engaging, tangible experience of the challenges we face on a global scale. They were asked to be curious about how cooperation can lead us into an age of omni-considerate, inter-accomodating, spontaneously regenerative actions as a species. Ben skillfully prompted the group while his assistant used AI to generate challenges and news updates for the progression of the storyline, using live data from the groups interactions. It was a fun thought experiment that sparked significant and important conversations about our presence here on earth and the impacts that our resource-hungry needs have on global ecosystems and wellbeing.

Thomas Zung donated a tensegrity model to SIU collections and gave a short talk after a great presentation by Roxi and Ari on the Design Science Studio. By this time, we were all feeling rather cohesive as group of die-hard Trimtabs. Peter Meisen led a great discussion and participatory experience about the world energy grid called the Sim Center. I had a few brief chats with Curt McNamara, who I had known for years online through his Trimtab book club and other Fuller groups. There were many other talks and panels that I unfortunately missed.

I had the pleasure of attending one of the most engrossing and entertaining performances I have seen in a long time at the Varsity Theater in Carbondale. It was a one-man play called ‘The History and Mystery of the Universe’ by D.W. Jacobs. It chronicles Bucky’s life and discoveries in such a tactful and deeply considerate way. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and skill of the performance by Jon-Michael Rutter as a young Bucky.

At the entrance to the Varsity theater was a series of large art prints designed by me (Synergetics University) and sponsored by the BFI and the Design Science Studio. I saw them again as I walked into the Varsity some days later for a panel I was on with Bucky himself (Jon-Michael Rutter). We were joined by a nice fellow named Brian Wilson who presented on the similarities between Bucky and the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. It was a lively talk moderated by Ben Lowder, who prompted us to share our work. I had the opportunity to share the trailer for the Doc that Dante and I are putting together.

There are odes to Bucky everywhere in Carbondale, it was truly refreshing to feel like his ideas were still colorfully trimtabbing our eyes toward nature’s coordinate system in unsuspecting southern Illinois. I went on a mural tour with a group of Fuller Futurites and we got to see some really creative odes to Bucky. Late one evening, we came across a dome with a labyrinth in it, there were dome cookies in the coffee shop… how had I been so clueless as to the existence of this vibrant little town?

In the days leading up to the Design Science Studio’s Making the Invisible Visible Salon that would close the festival on Sunday, I played a small supporting role in the creation of sixteen or so large cardboard Vector Equilibria for the stage. I was amazed how quickly we all transformed the Northlight studio into a very cozy and interesting conference center and streaming studio. Roxi, Ari, Mage, Eve, Mark, Zahra, Mony, Doc, George, Elle, Shannon, Jalen and many others pulled off a truly huge feat of showcasing DSS Cohort members and their work. I was in awe of how seamless the whole production went for 15 hours straight with such a small team. We ended up jamming and waxing poetic till the wee hours in the makeshift gallery, with a small crew of us closing out the night.

A ripe cherry on top of the Fuller Future Sundae.

It gave me hope in our shared future. We had reached a quorum of design thinking and synergized an experience that left us all changed for the better. Almost everyone I talked to was enamored by what transpired over the four days at SIU. It was small and I would love to see it reach more young people, but I see the event as a great success. I co-created a lot of beautiful, shared memories with people. I hope that the conversations and relationships sparked at this event will have a beneficial and lasting impact on our communities.

I hitched a ride back to St. Louis with two young gentlemen named Peter Meisen and Jeff Perlis and we stopped by the Fuller Dome on the Edwardsville campus to meet up with Benjamin, just in time for the tornado sirens to go off. The dome happened to be a tornado shelter, so I wasn’t concerned as Benjamin answered interview questions and they assembled the dymaxion floor map for a timelapse. Ben has put together a great team of students and facilitators there and he is doing a great job bringing life and attention to Fuller’s ideas for people of all ages. I cant wait to go back!

The swirling of everything we went through that week culminated in my plane almost being pulled off the runway by another surge of the tornado, grounding us for over a half hour to wait out the storm. When we finally took off, I thought of the trimtab and how grateful I was for the thousands of engineers and brilliant minds that led to me safely embarking… back home.

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I had a sudden realization about halfway through David Abram's magnificent book, The Spell of the Sensuous (1997). Why didn't anyone teach me that the alphabet is a technology? I memorized the ABCs so early in life that I never seriously questioned the origin of its symbolism. What are these occult letters - nothing but scribbles on paper (and screen…

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Bucky taught Comprehensive Design at Black Mountain College in 1948 and 1949, a time when he made some crucial developments in his work with geodesics as well as other core concepts of Synergetics. Kenneth Snelson, originally drawn to Black Mountain College by the Bauhaus master painter Josef Albers, fo…

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“As with Descartes and Plato, geometry has been revered for millenia as a branch of mathematical knowledge that has risen periodically to become the standard for all knowledge. In this sense, geometry is a tradition. The tradition of geometry is the history of its imposition as a standard upon knowledge. It is distinct from the tradition of philosophy on account of its concern with a single form of knowledge (Husserl imagined a ‘Thales of geometry’). How does Synergetics stand in relation to this tradition? It imposes its particular geometry as the new standard for all knowledge.”

-Dante Diotallevi “What is Synergetics”

The Bauersfeld Zeiss Dome

Oftentimes people criticize Fuller for claiming to invent the Geodesic dome and other artifacts, when others had already created examples of them before him. One such example is the Zeiss dome built in Jena, Germany by Walther Bauersfeld in 1926 — 25 years before Fuller patented the Geodesic Dome.

Fuller sought to develop Synergetics and the models therein by starting from the fundamental, observable generalized principles in Universe. When reading Synergetics, it is obvious that Fuller was not looking to Bauersfeld for his geometric approach to innovation, but rather, was working with first principles to model natures energetic transference patterns — starting with the tetrahedron as the prime volume in the omni-triangulated event constellations considered in Universe.

Synergetics did not arise in a vacuum though — the rich history of geometry and modeling “divine” proportions found in nature created the intellectual landscape by which Synergetics became necessary. The exponential growth in innovation, computation and communication that humanity saw between 1895 and 1983 (a Bucky lifetime) was fertile soil for a renaissance in design and pattern thinking to be sewn. We are currently in the gestation period of that seed of Design Science as it finds its roots amidst the turbulent acres of humanity’s seeking.

Alexander Graham Bell,

widely known as the inventor of the Telephone, created magnificent Tetrahedral kites that showcased alternating Tetrahedra and Octahedra patternings, one of the fundamental explorations in Synergetics.

“By locating the source of his innovations and patents in nature, Fuller could sidestep the inevitable challenges to the originality of his work. Alexander Graham Bell’s experiments with tetrahedral kites and space-frame towers were a key precedent to Fuller, though one he insisted was brought to his attention long after he reached his independent conclusions. The fact that he had unknowingly pursued investigations similar to Bell’s was added proof that a universal coordinated system existed. ‘‘It’s the way nature behaves, so we both discovered nature. It isn’t something you invent. You discover it.’’
-K. Micheal Hays, Dana Miller “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe”

There were various scholars of the 20th century whom Fuller saw as influential in solving nature’s design challenges in ways that were compatible with Synergetic pattern analysis. For example, Fuller dedicated Synergetics to Harold Coxeter, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest geometers of the 20th century, and Dutch scientist and crystallographer Arthur Loeb wrote the prologue and appendices in Synergetics.

“Buckminster Fuller’s search for a natural and truly rational coordinate system eventually led to the tensegrity concept and the construction of geodesic domes. Polyhedra and pentagrams, being proven useful after all, have been rescued from the limbo of superstition. Now the danger exists that geometrics will become respectable once more, and it behooves us to take a good look at the very unorthodox peregrinations of Fuller’s mind before stepping into the inviting straitjacket. One of the most intriguing aspects of the present book is that there are so few ex post facto rationalizations; Fuller allows us to share his methods, his meanderings, the early influences.”

-Arthur Loeb “Synergetics”

Bucky met with Einstein in 1936, who apparently expressed intrigue about Fuller’s work. Einstein is mentioned many times throughout Synergetics and his famous equation seems to fit right into Fuller’s accounting. Fuller saw Synergetics as the embracing, accomodating framework by which the many specialized studies of science converge - the throughline by which the generalized principles discovered by Einstein, Russel, Euler and others were united in a common language.

987.075 Although Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell did not recognize the full conceptual implications, their "new mathematics" of set theory and empty sets were tour de force attempts by the leading abstract nonconceptual mathematicians of their day to anticipate the inevitable historical convergence of their mathematics with the inherently conceptual topology of Euler, as well as with the phase rule of Gibbs in chemistry, the simplified quantum mechanics of Dirac in physics, and the homogenizing biochemistry and physics of virology's DNA-RNA design programming—all remotely but inexorably rendezvousing with Boltzmann's, Einstein's, and Hubble's astrophysics and cosmology to constitute unitary science's unitary self-regenerative, untenably equilibrious, cosmiccoordinate system to be embraced and accommodated by the epistemography of synergetics.

“One progenitor Fuller did acknowledge was D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. Thompson’s seminal 1917 book On Growth and Form demonstrated the morphological similarities of a wide variety of organic substances and the mathematical basis underlying their structure and growth. Thompson’s arguments were punctuated with illustrations by Emst Haeckel and photos by Arthur Worthington, among others, and in later versions with photos by Harold Edgerton as well.”

-K. Micheal Hays, Dana Miller “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe”

Bucky’s Dedication at the beginning of Synergetics:

THIS WORK IS DEDICATED TO
H. S. M. COXETER
PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

To me no experience of childhood so reinforced selfconfidence
in one’s own exploratory faculties
as did geometry. Its inspiring effectiveness in
winnowing out and evaluating a plurality
of previously unknowns from a few given
knowns, and its elegance of proof
lead to the further discovery and comprehension of a
grand strategy for all
problem solving.

By virtue of his extraordinary life’s work in mathematics,
Dr. Coxeter is the geometer of our bestirring
twentieth century, the spontaneously acclaimed
terrestrial curator of the historical
inventory of the science of
pattern analysis.

I dedicate this work with particular esteem for him
and in thanks to all the geometers of all time
whose importance to humanity
he epitomizes.

791.08 Humanity has inherited an inventory of generalized laws of Universe from the Copernicus-Kepler-Galileo-Newton discoveries, which they in turn inherited from their Greek, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese predecessors. There is no information to suggest that the inventory has been completed. All of the generalized laws can be expressed in mathematical terms. They are all eternally operative and interaccommodative. Together, the thus-fardiscovered generalized laws guarantee the integrity of nonsimultaneous, only partially overlapping, Scenario Universe.

16th Century Geometers

Marshall McLuhan called Bucky “the 20th century Leonardo da Vinci.” At one time Bucky was famous in the United States and around the world, but his name seems to have slipped into obscurity as his books have gone out of print. Will Fuller and his work have the same longevity as Leonardo?

The 1500’s were a rich time in the history of geometric modeling and the search for divine harmony in shape and form. The advent of the printing press, the renaissance of greek and roman thought in Europe and the translation of latin texts heralded a wave of geometric art and science that has remained some of the most beautiful and insightful explorations of Geometry ever published. Leonardo Da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Augustin Hirschvogel, Daniele Barbaro, Lorenz Stoer and Wenzel Jamnitzer, among others, all contributed profoundly to this renaissance of polyhedral accounting and modeling.

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Johannes Kepler

“Mysterium Cosmographicum” (1596) • “Harmony of the World” (1619)

Robert Fludd

“Physical, Metaphysical and Technical History of the Macrocosm and Microcosm” (1617)

The Kepler-Fludd Polemic

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli studied the letters exchanged between Kepler and Fludd, wherein they disputed the true structure of the cosmos. Influenced by Carl Jung, Pauli traced the mystifying discoveries of quantum physics back to this decisive ‘watershed moment‘ in early 17th century Europe. He understood their polemic as an archetypal divide between the emerging method of modern science and ancient traditions of symbolism and alchemy. Synergetics discloses the technique for healing this enduring schism of worldviews, creating harmony between science and wisdom without sacrificing standards of objectivity. Fuller’s thought accomplished this in two ways: by returning to the mathematical roots of conceptual awareness and by invalidating the biases of modern skepticism. Such radical reformation of our established intellectual habits is not a straightforward process, however. Culture, like the human psyche, instinctively defends itself against threats to its integrity, whether the danger is real or merely apparent.

“As ordering operators and image-formers in this world of symbolical images, the archetypes thus function as the sought-for bridge between the sense perceptions and the ideas and are, accordingly, a necessary presupposition even for evolving a scientific theory of nature. However, one must guard against transferring this a priori of knowledge into the conscious mind and relating it to definite ideas capable of rational formulation.”

-Wolfgang Pauli
“The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on Kepler’s Theories” (1952)

Watch this video to learn more about Synergetics in the context of the Kepler-Fludd polemic:

WATCH THIS VIDEO TO LEARN MORE

986.121 Avogadro discovered that under identical conditions of pressure and heat all elements in their gaseous state always consist of the same number of molecules per given volume. Since the chemical elements are fundamentally different in electron-proton componentation, this concept seemed to me to be the "Grand Central Station" of nature's numerical coordinate system's geometric volume-that numerically exact volumes contain constant, exact numbers of fundamental energy entities. This was the numerical and geometrical constancy for which I was looking. I determined to generalize Avogadro's experimentally proven hypothesis that "under identical conditions of heat and pressure all gases disclose the same number of molecules per given volume.

Conclusion

Buckminster Fuller was a human being who grew from a complex of overlapping events that informed his functioning in Universe. His search for generalized principles, the laws of the Universe, was not a new endeavor — it is something that has probably inspired humanity since the beginning of thought itself. Fuller sought to identify the underlying framework that united the sciences and provided an effective means by which to innovate, instigate, investigate, and apply the progressively apprehended generalized principles. Synergetics was his answer to the increasingly specialized search for answers — opening the door to a comprehensive approach to problem-solving and offering humanity a way to address greater life support challenges while using fewer resources. What is the future of Synergetics? Will it be adopted on a scale that brings about changes in the world? Only time will tell. Part of our work is making sure this important work, no matter what, is not lost to history.

LINKS

The Polyhedral Perspective By Noam Andrews
When geometrical solids took hold of the Renaissance imagination, they promised the quintessence of the third dimension in its pure and unadulterated form. Noam Andrews discovers how polyhedra descended from mathematical treatises to artists’ studios, distilling abstract ideas into objects one could see and touch.

The Geometric Landscapes of Lorenz Stoer (1567)
“Not much is known about Stoer. Born in Nuremberg in the 1530s, he is said to have been a student of a student of Albrecht Dürer (who introduced the principles of linear perspective into northern Europe after studying them in Bologna).”

16th-Century Geometric and Perspective Drawings
“This sequence of increasingly complex geometrical figures and perspective drawings — collected in a sixteenth-century watercolor manuscript and preserved at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel — comes with no author’s note, editor’s preface, or running commentary.”

Augustin Hirschvogel (1543)
A True and Thorough Instruction in Geometry (Ein aigentliche und grundtliche anweysung in die Geometria)

Early drawings of polyhedra - some of the earliest depictions of the Icosidodecahedron and Rhombicosidodecahedron

Ernst Haeckel “Kunstformen der Natur” (1899)
“Originally published in sets of ten between 1899 and 1904 and collectively in two volumes in 1904, it consists of 100 prints of various organisms, many of which were first described by Haeckel himself. Over the course of his career, over 1000 prints were produced based on Haeckel’s sketches and watercolors; many of the best of these were chosen for Kunstformen der Natur, translated from sketch to print by lithographer Adolf Giltsch”

Max Brückner “Polygons and Polyhedra, Theory and History” (1900)
a richly illustrated exploration of the mathematical properties, classifications, and historical development of polygons and polyhedra, highlighting both their geometric rigor and their aesthetic significance.

Wenzel Jamnitzer “Perspectiva corporum regularium” (1568)
a masterful Renaissance work that presents highly detailed, artistically rendered perspectives of regular and semi-regular polyhedra, bridging mathematical precision with geometric artistry.