Friends,

Marc Pelletier, Zometool founder and the man who understood Steve Baer’s 31-zone system better than anyone in this part of the galaxy, died last night. Our appreciation for his contribution to humanity can only grow.

Paul H.

It is our hope that Marc's considerable gifts will live forever.

May he rest in peace.

https://skfb.ly/6npvV

They call the endeavor "The Connect 4 Project," because the four districts involved are those in the Connect 4 Program (which facilitates the sharing of resources among the four districts) and because the structures made by the students in the four districts will be literally connected to complete the final structure. The Connect 4 Project has been generously funded by CABOCES (the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services for Cattaraugus, Allegany, Erie, and Wyoming counties in southwestern New York State).

UPDATE:
Chris put together this wonderful page detailing many aspects of the project and including a wonderful video of the final moments of construction, check it out:

http://www.sbu.edu/academics/schools/arts-and-scie...

The Buckyball was first observed on September 2nd, 1984.

The properties of the molecule were surprising and its structure a mystery. Close to midnight on September 9th, Smalley hit on the geometric shape most likely to embody their discovery; the truncated icosahedron.

In 1996 Smalley, Kroto, and Curl won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The presenter of the Nobel noted that the discovery of fullerenes has implications for all the natural sciences. Born of astronomy, it has expanded knowledge of chemistry and physics. Fullerenes have been found in geological formations and in sooty flames. Possible future uses include in antibiotics and as armor.

Twenty-five years after their discovery, fullerenes provide abundant research opportunities in pure chemistry, materials science, pharmaceutical chemistry, and nanotechnology.

Read a fuller account of the discovery from the American Chemical Society: http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/fullerenes.html

To commemorate this event, we're releasing a limited number of beautiful all-black buckyballs.  

The Design 5 kit is a toy that grown-ups may enjoy more than the kids. The colors are just in black and white but it functions just like the color-coordinated Zometools that can make those breath-taking 3D geometrical structures. Like its colorful counterparts, the possibilities are endless but the new Zometool Design collection has a much more sophisticated look so that Dad or the children can create something that Dad can proudly hang on the wall in his office. Why hang up a painting when you can create new wall art every month with Zometool Design 5 and then Dad can show his colleagues how deep a thinker he really is!

Check out the original post here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennchoi/2014/06/05/t...

The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize is the most important research prize in Germany. The Leibniz Programme, which was established in 1985, aims to improve the working conditions of outstanding scientists to expand their research opportunities, relieve them of administrative tasks and to help them employ particularly qualified young scientists is. The prize is worth up to 2.5 million euros. The promotion will only be granted on a proposal from a third party. The decision on the winners by the Chief shot based on a recommendation of the Nomination Committee for the Leibniz program.

Leif Kobbelt regarded as the outstanding German computer graphics in the field of geometry processing and as one of the most innovative and productive representative of his field of research worldwide, is one of the winners of the 2014 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. His work makes a significant contribution to meet the growing demands of our modern information society to the real picture possible three-dimensional models. For Kobbelt looking for algorithms and data structures, with which highly complex 3-D objects can be modeled as efficiently as possible, modified, optimized and finally visualized interactively. The focus of his interest while subdivision schemes and mesh networks are in 3-D models; here he has delivered pioneering contributions to both the analysis and modification of existing mesh networks ("Multiresolution Modeling") as well as for the generation and optimization of new high-quality mesh networks ("Polygon Mesh Generation and Optimization"). Last but not least Kobbelt is one of the pioneers in the field of "Point-based Graphics," in which surfaces are represented only by a sufficiently dense set of points - but without any information on the links between the points.

A team at RWTH Aachen developed the Zometool Mesh Approximation algorithm featured here recently.

Visit this link to find out more:

http://www.dfg.de/gefoerderte_projekte/wissenschaftliche_preise/leibniz-preis/2014/kobbelt/index.html

A team from RWTH Aachen University in Germany has developed an app to generate Zometool meshes from 3D models.

"Our research in this project focuses on discrete optimization methods in order to use this construction system for the approximation and represention of general (freeform) shapes. The representation (Zome-Mesh) has the form of a polygon mesh with the vertices and edges conforming to the Zometool system." 

You can find out more in the project's page:

http://www.rwth-graphics.de/software/zometool

And don't miss this video of the process in action!

http://youtu.be/LDoL2LR_MuA

Inspired!

"So when I recently re-watched James Tanton’s brilliant video “What is Pi for a Square?“, the idea hit me: for Pi Day, students could explore the value of “Pi” for various Zometool-constructible solids!"

See the full post here:

http://zmtl.us/wjt

However, unlike most previously known fullerenes, the new shapes’ hundreds of faces are flat rather than warped, and the atoms in the molecule are equally spaced.

Below we see how the new shapes can more closely approach a spherical shape than classical fullerenes (right):

— MOLECULAR GRAPHICS PERFORMED WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO CHIMERA PACKAGE. FIGURE PROVIDED BY S. SCHEIN

The new shapes:

- Are convex, which means they do not have parts that are caved in,

- they do not have equal angles but they do have equilateral edges (meaning each edge is the same length), and

- all of their faces are “planar”, which is very important, meaning that the faces lie flat and do not bulge in or out.

Stan Schein (left) and James Gayed are not mathematicians, but they are polyhedron lovers:

—PHOTO CREDIT ALEX YEH

Below, some examples of these new forms —which are a modification of a previously known class of cages called Goldberg cages:

Find out more with these two great articles: 

Science News

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