Richard Smalley

American chemist (1943–2005), co-discoverer of the fullerenes and Nobel laureate.

Richard Errett Smalley was an American chemist who spent most of his career at Rice University in Houston, where he built the cluster-beam apparatus used to vaporize graphite with a laser. In 1985, working with Harold Kroto and Robert Curl, he took part in the experiments that revealed C60, a remarkably stable 60-carbon molecule. The three shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery, which opened the field of fullerene and later nanotube chemistry.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: influenced-by-fuller. When Smalley and his collaborators tried to explain why a cluster of exactly sixty carbon atoms was so stable, they reasoned toward a closed cage of pentagons and hexagons — the same pattern of struts that gives R. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes their strength. Recognizing the debt, the team named the molecule "buckminsterfullerene" (soon nicknamed the "buckyball") after Fuller, and the broader family of closed carbon cages became known as fullerenes. The connection is a direct case of Fuller's geodesic geometry, and the polyhedral thinking behind his Synergetics, supplying the conceptual key to a molecular structure.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
• Synergetics (Synergetics) — Fuller's geometry of polyhedra whose cage forms echo the buckyball

Sources

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