Richard Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster Fuller was born on 12 July 1895 in Massachusetts, USA. In 1912 he began to study at Harvard but was thrown out of the university and became a marine. After various jobs in industry he began to work as an architect. In the late 1920s he had some success with new building concepts, which he presented to the public under the name "Dymaxion" (Dymaxion-Globus). His great success began in the 1950s with the construction of geodesic domes; his most famous is arguably the Geodesic Dome for the 1967 Expo in Montreal. He worked as a designer, scientist, developer and writer. In 1968 he became a professor at Southern Illinois University, later at the University of Pennsylvania. Between 1954 and 1981 Fuller received 47 honorary doctorates and over 100 awards and prizes. A special form of carbon was named fullerene after him: its chemical structure is reminiscent of his dome constructions. Buckminster Fuller died in 1983 in Los Angeles.