Feb 9, 2022
Going Viral
My stories around Synergetics and the virus don’t necessarily feature the latest terminology. I feature Michael Goldberg, a mathematician Bucky overlapped in several areas. Space-filling tetrahedra being another.
I talk about Bucky’s disappointment at not getting a mention in the Scientific American retrospective on these breakthrough discoveries. All the more fitting we name C60 “buckminsterfullerene” in a whole family of fullerenes, to be followed by nanotubes (“buckytubes” in some magazines) and graphene.
The whole dawning of the Age of Carbon, as some have dubbed it, is another way of saying we discovered the geometry of nature at a whole other level. Linus Pauling played a central role. That nature is more into 60 degrees than 90 degrees is really the new consensus, not some marginal position. Pop open any organic chemistry book, and the teaching is obvious.
What I’m tickled about is the linked virus page linked above is also linked from OEIS, from the very page for that famous sequence: 1, 12, 42, 92… (icosahedral numbers).
