In chemistry class one day - and I forget if it was organic or inorganic at the time - it was brought up that during some burning of carbon fuels that there's this odd chance the 'free' carbon atoms could coalesce into each other and make neat hexagonal shapes.
One potential is a full sphere - like a soccer ball - and it is called a "buckminsterfullerene" or nicknamed a "buckyball" (either a C60 or a C100 if I recall), and was so named after the scientist R. Buckminster Fuller.
Bucky was so interested in spheres. He thought that a true sphere in nature, couldn't be just a perfect arc, there had to be structure to it so small that it just appeared perfectly curved - so at what point does that happen? He started to create these geodesic domes (think like Epcot Centre) that would have 100s of 'node points' on it to connect and add strength.
Mr. Fuller was born July 12, 1895 and died in 1983, just 1 year before the discovery of the buckyball in chemistry.
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