Buckyball, Truncated Icosahedron, Soccer Ball, C60

thingiverse

#### Multiple Ways to Have Fun with the Buckyball, Truncated Icosahedron, Soccer Ball, C60, Halves #####In honor of Prof. Buckminster Fuller, who taught at SIU Carbondale in the 1960s. The buckyball is simply beautiful! It is an arrangement of 20 regular hexagons and 12 regular pentagons in a mathematically appealing structure with other amazing properties. In a 3D design world, we can make a buckyball from an icosahedron. First, make an icosahedron (one of the 5 Platonic solids) from a regular triangle using extrusion (or other methods). A basic understanding of the dihedral angle is useful. Then, we could slice off all the 12 vertices of the icosahedron using a plane through 1/3 of the icosahedron edge length around a given vertex. Consequently, if the icosahedron edge length is 30 mm, the resulting buckyball has an edge length of 10 mm. Each vertex of the icosahedron collapses to a pentagon; each regular triangle will become a regular hexagon. #### Among the Files 1. **The measurements refer to the original edge length of the foundational icosahedron**. One third of that is the edge length of the buckyball. 2. Solid buckyballs of various sizes. 3. Shelled buckyballs of various sizes and styles. 4. Wired buckyballs of various sizes. 5. Half buckyballs (hexagonal bottom & pentagonal bottom), which cannot be mixed. Two of the same version add up to a buckyball ####References 1. https://ethw.org/Discovering_the_Buckyball 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene 3. https://www.popsci.com/buckyball-magic-molecule 4. https://eic.rsc.org/feature/symmetry-of-buckminsterfullerene/2020237.article 5. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinknudson/2015/07/23/the-mathematics-of-buckyballs/#1b346d946f77 6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller 7. Curl, Robert F., and Richard E. Smalley. "Fullerenes." Scientific American 265, no. 4 (1991): 54-63. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24938758.