Puzzling News / Dec 2000


	SCOTT KIM’S PUZZLING NEWS / DECEMBER 2000 Buckminster Fuller: The Play

Last weekend I went to San Francisco with my friend Dan Ambrosi to see the one-man play R. Buckminster Fuller: The History [and Mystery] of the Universe. It's playing through the end of the year, so if you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, you still have a chance to see it. It's worth going. After the 3pm Sunday matinees there are discussions with special guests, including Bucky’s daughter and grandson.
Before I saw the play I had read a bit about Bucky and his inventions. But I hadn't understood how his ideas sprang from a fiercely individualistic crusade to reject common practice and find new solutions to the world's problems. Like a good documentary, the play places Bucky's ideas in the context of his life.

At the most basic level the play is a stirring call to wake up. The front of the program quotes Bucky: "If the success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?"

Not entirely coincidentally, Dan and I had dinner before the show at my favorite San Francisco restaurant Millenium, which trumpets a similar slogan from Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has." Millenium serves large portions of fabulously delicious and inventive vegetarian cuisine at reasonable prices. Like the Fuller play, Millenium views itself as a force for social change.

Bucky noted that new technologies were able to do more and more with less and less, a process he called "ephemeralization." That reminded Dan of the thrilling visionary book Telecosm, which describes how fiberoptic telecommunications technology keeps increasing in capacity as it shrinks in size.

Bucky has influenced me from many angles. The cover of my book Inversions features an infinitely repeating design on the word "synergy" composed of just three repeated modules. You can see this design on my site as this month's featured Inversion. I had Bucky in mind when I made the design, and had the privilege of giving him a copy of the design at a booksigning for Tetrascroll at Printers Inc. Bookstore in Palo Alto.

Synergy is the behavior of a whole unpredicted by its parts, such as the dramatic way that a bundle of sticks and strings suddenly pops into 3d form in one of his "tensegrity" figures. If you haven't experienced this, try building one yourself with the wonderful construction kit Tensegritoy. By the way, the original credit belongs to well-known sculptor Kenneth Snelson, who was inspired by Fuller to create the first tensegrity figures, which he later developed into stunning monumental sculptures.

Bucky is best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, which is in turn based on his focus on the tetrahedron as the atomic unit of 3-dimensional structure. In 1985 I was listening to my friend educational reformer David Thornburg give a talk about Bucky's work. He demonstrated how two triangles can be twisted open and combined to make a tetrahedron. It occured to me that I might be able to do this with my fingers, and a few minutes later I figured out how. This led me to a whole subcareer as a mathematical dancer that continues today.

Fuller bucked tradition all his life in his quest for truth. But sometimes that got in his way. I struggle with similar issues, so I find myself both attracted and repulsed by Fuller. At one point he decided that dressing unconventionally was distracting people from hearing his message, so he wisely became "the invisible man," donning a conservative banker’s suit. He was less successful in exorcising his unconventional use of language — his self-invented jargon tended to attract a cult of fans.

While Bucky will always be an inspiration to me, I prefer to head in the direction of people who have successfully made the leap from innovator to practitioner. I have long been inspired by computer scientist Lynn Conway, whose story is told in the current issue of Scientific American. I first read it on a bulletin board when she and I were both at Xerox PARC.

In the 70s Conway and colleague Carver Mead codified the design of very large integrated circuits (VLSI) into a highly simplified easy-to-teach series of design rules. To spread their findings, they imagined what their work would look like in ten years when it had become common practice. Instead of writing a book that proclaimed something new and revolutionary, they wrote a mature textbook that pretended VLSI design had been around a long time. They then taught VLSI design courses at key universities and had chips fabricated. The trick work, and their ideas were quickly adopted.

WHAT’S NEW DECEMBER 2000

Store. Looking for puzzling gifts? Try my online store, where you can find all my creations, including inversions posters and t-shirts.

Inversion of the Month: Synergy. Synergy is the behavior of a whole unpredicted by the behavior of its parts. Here I have built a repeating pattern on the word synergy from just three modules.

Discover Magazine Boggler. December: This month features three puzzles on the theme of invention: Clip Joints (about the invention of the paper clip), See My Point (about the invention of the pencil), and Accidental Inventions.

FROM READERS

Cindy Mendiola, geometry teacher at St. Joseph High School in Lakewood, California, writes: "I have been assigning my Geometry students a project to create their own inversions for the last several years, and now also have my own class website. I had never required them to write a paragraph explaining what they did - but this year it is part of their assignment. So far I have posted on my site a few of my own inversions that I created while getting ready to teach them about rotational symmetry. I must tell you that they are so excited since I usually require them to use their own names as inversions." Be sure to click on the link after the first bullet point to see inversions that Ms. Mendiola created herself.

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