Hugh Aldersey-Williams

British science writer and journalist (b. 1959), author of The Most Beautiful Molecule.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a British author and journalist who writes on science, design, and material culture for a general audience. His book The Most Beautiful Molecule: The Discovery of the Buckyball (1995) recounts the discovery of buckminsterfullerene (C60), the third form of carbon, and the community of chemists who found and characterized it.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: chronicler. Aldersey-Williams did not know R. Buckminster Fuller personally; his tie is through the molecule that bears Fuller's name. Buckminsterfullerene, the roughly spherical C60 cage discovered in 1985, was named for Fuller because its closed lattice of pentagons and hexagons echoes the structure of his geodesic domes. In The Most Beautiful Molecule, Aldersey-Williams narrates that discovery and, in doing so, carries Fuller's geometric legacy into the story of late-twentieth-century chemistry, making him a popular chronicler of the Fuller connection to modern materials science.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure, for whom the buckyball is named

Sources

• Compiled from general knowledge and corpus mentions; no single work in this corpus anchors this figure.