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

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.

For a great overview of Synergetics, check out 'Synergetics on the Web' by Kirby Urner

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.*

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

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

Click on the link below to read Clinton's Equal Central Angle Conjecture, a 9 page PDF paper on Goldberg polyhedra by BFI board member Joe Clinton. "In 1937 Michael Goldberg introduced 'a class of multi-symetric polyhedra' consisting of twelve pentagons, eight quadrilaterals or four triangles and all additional faces being hexagons. Thus he introduced the fact that 'trihedral polyhedrea which posses the same number of hexagonal faces in addition to 12 (8, or 4) regularily and symmetrically disposed pentagons (quadrilaterals, or triangles) can be topologically different'"

In May 1955, a group of students from The School of Design, North Carolina State College at Raleigh, produced a booklet entitled "An Introduction to the Energetic-Synergetic Geometry of R Buckminster Fuller." The booklet was"basically an attempt to illustrate the thought proceses and principles which have led to the development of geodesic structures." It would be wonderful to see the contents of the rest of the booklet but unfortunately this interesting cover piece is all that we have found so far.
» Click here for a bigger version

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.

Below please find a six page PDF document that details the Development of Tensegrity Structures. This overview had previously been included in the Tensegritoy Toys produced by Design Science Toys Ltd
Development of Tensegrity Structures (PDF)

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