Arthur L. Loeb

Dutch-American crystallographer, chemical physicist, and design scientist (1923–2002).

Arthur Lee Loeb was born in Amsterdam on July 13, 1923 and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2002. Having fled the Netherlands in 1940, he earned a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard in 1949 and did early work on core memory for MIT's Whirlwind computer. At MIT and later at Harvard, where he taught in the Visual and Environmental Studies department, he developed what he called "Visual Mathematics" — a language of spatial patterns and symmetry bridging science and art. He is the author of Space Structures: Their Harmony and Counterpoint (1976) and Concepts & Images: Visual Mathematics (1993), and was a founder of the International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: collaborator. Loeb's work on polyhedra, close-packing, and spatial symmetry ran parallel to Buckminster Fuller's geometry, and the two became long-term intellectual collaborators. His essay "Contribution to Synergetics" appears in Synergetics, the major work R. Buckminster Fuller wrote with E. J. Applewhite, where Loeb supplied a rigorous crystallographer's grounding for Fuller's more intuitive claims about space. He belongs to the circle of mathematically minded interpreters of Fuller's synergetics alongside figures such as Amy Edmondson.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
• Synergetics (Synergetics) — Fuller's work containing Loeb's "Contribution to Synergetics"
• E. J. Applewhite (E. J. Applewhite) — Fuller's co-author on Synergetics
• Amy Edmondson (Amy Edmondson) — fellow interpreter of Fuller's synergetic geometry

Sources

• Loeb (Arthur Lee) papers — Stanford University finding aid (biographical note and bibliography) drawn from the Buckyverse corpus.