Customer Reviews

A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Design Science Collection)

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Cartesian geometry is not merely inconvenient, but wrong enough so that it's actively hindering our civilization. It's a blind alley, in the same way Roman numerals were.

Buckminster Fuller's most startling inventions are trivial exercises of the theory in this book.

Sorry to sound hysterical, but this is a really important book, and it's much too neglected. It should definitely NOT be out of print. It's right up there with Euclid. Fuller was a genius, but he couldn't write. Edmondson can.

Amy Edmondson worked closely with Buckminster Fuller before he died. She extracted, and explains in this book Fuller's least tractable, least appreciated concepts: His realization that the natural analytic geometry of the universe is tetrahedral. This is the stuff that people were forming study groups to try to extract from "Synergetics," and she just lays it out, in neat, logical prose with clear diagrams, and references to related scholarly literature...

Fuller (according to Edmondson) ran into tetrahedral geometry by no less than three different routes: close packing of spheres, three dimensional stabilization of an object by either compressive or tensile members. Then, as a trivial exercise, a result, there's a proof that the maximum strength homogenous truss is tetrahedral. Then, almost as an aside, it happens that all the regular solids (except the icosahedron) have volumes that are integral multiples of the volume of a tetrahedron!

Right about then, I began to think that everything I know about geometry is, not wrong eactly, but just not the right way. You know, like finding arabic numerals when you've been using roman numerals your whole life.

I was totally blown away, and I was expecting to be bored spitless.

If you're interested in Buckminster Fuller's work, GET THIS BOOK!
If you're a mathematician, GET THIS BOOK!!!
Really!

Buckminster Fuller's "Synergetics" is a fabulous text, but grasping its words in their fullness is challenging. I have gone to the depths on some of the sections of that book: the rewards are great, but the cost is also tremendous.

Professor Amy Edmondson provides a translation for the ages in A Fuller Explanation. While honoring the work of Fuller, she presents the ideas in a way that can be understood by anyone.

To understand how things work, it's critical to understand the nature of physical structure. These concepts are rarely discussed unless you study physics or material science in detail. That's a darn shame, because understanding structure is critical to understanding how nature creates structure -- and how it's so different than manmade structure.

This book is back in print -- it's just not available at Amazon yet.
The ISBN of the new edition is 978-0-615-18314-5.

A brilliant book, but unfortunately the Kindle edition has problems. For example, the Greek letter pi, referenced often in the book, always shows up as a blank square. This makes it difficult to read. I'd expect this kind of textual error with an amateur OCR text, but not in a $10 version.

This book makes Fullers Synergistics much more understandable than Fullers books. Fuller did make some great contributions, especially the geodesic dome but this material is so similar to sacred geometry and I really wonder about the usefulness. I was also disappointed that I did not come away knowing how to describe my world in terms of Fullers dimensional system. Maybe I did not read carefully or maybe I am just not smart enough but I still do not know how to actually apply this to the world around me. I have a degree in engineering and I am good at describing the world in terms of orthogonal coordinates. I found the application of non-orthogonal dimensions confusing. Fuller was so compulsive about using precise language and yet in many ways his language is very imprecise and in some cases just plain stupid. In others he used common words in different ways creating confusion. This is not a fault of the book. I am assume the book presented him accurately.