Duncan Stuart

Painter and geometer at the North Carolina State College School of Design, Raleigh; house mathematician for Buckminster Fuller's Geodesics, Inc.

Duncan Stuart was a professor at the School of Design at North Carolina State College in Raleigh, where he taught for decades and served for years as faculty advisor to the noted Student Publication of the School of Design. Trained and working as a painter, he was also an accomplished mathematician, and it is his geometric work — above all the Triacon grid, which he discovered in the spring of 1951 — that secured his place in the history of geodesic geometry.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: collaborator. Stuart was the resident mathematician of R. Buckminster Fuller's Geodesics, Inc., whose Raleigh office sat within his own institution, the NC State School of Design. His Triacon grid solved the persistent "windows" problem in the earlier regular grid — vertices where three great circles failed to meet — and, by subdividing the spherical diamond of the thirty-one-great-circle grid, produced breakdowns that minimized the number of distinct strut lengths; it was used on nearly all the large domes subsequently engineered by Geodesics, Inc. His Class II "Method 3" breakdown is credited to him in Hugh Kenner's Geodesic Math and How to Use It. For Fuller's 100-foot Bangkok Trade Fair dome (a travelling U.S. exhibition structure of the late 1950s), Stuart designed the geodesic-globe sculpture housed within it. As a longtime advisor at the School of Design, he was also part of the geodesic-math circle whose testimony historians have drawn on in reassessing Fuller's later claims.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
• Geodesic Math and How to Use It (Geodesic Math) — credits Stuart's Class II "Method 3" breakdown
• Student Publication of the School of Design (School of Design Index) — the NC State journal he advised for years
• Artifacts of R. Buckminster Fuller, Vol. 3 (Artifacts, Vol. 3) — documents the Bangkok Trade Fair dome and Stuart's geodesic-globe sculpture

Sources

• Anchored by corpus mentions in Geodesic Math and How to Use It (Triacon grid; "Method 3"), Artifacts of R. Buckminster Fuller, Vol. 3 (Bangkok Trade Fair dome), and New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller (Stuart's testimony in the tensegrity-priority discussion), plus his recurring credit as faculty advisor in the Student Publication of the School of Design index. Compiled from these mentions; no single dedicated biography in this corpus anchors this figure.