mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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 Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005 5:04 am Post subject: Buckyball co-discoverer dead |
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He died rather young.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051029/sc_nm/buckyballs_dc
There was a funny story about how this form of carbon was found. Carbon was known to form two structures in nature: the diamond lattice and the graphite lattice. Scientist suspected there was a third but they couldn't figure out what structure. Eventually they figured out it was a sphere, made up of hexagon and pentagon shapes. The chemists were blown away by these odd sphere and pretty sure it was a unique structure. One of them called a professor in the math department to see if anyone there had heard of this mysterious structure. He began to describe the sphere, with its hex and pentagon shapes, and wondered if there was any "math" on this.
The math professor was silent for a bit. "Well, I could give you some math papers describing what you've discovered but let me make it simple for you. You're talking about a soccer ball."
Doh! |
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