Friday, June 1, 2007

Escher's buckyball

Chern Chuang and his classmates created this amazing beaded buckyball made from 90 small beaded buckyballs. They are going to present this beautiful artwork as a gift to our chemistry department in the graduation ceremony for NTUCHEM class 2007 this coming weekend. I wish I can have a picture for this event.

As to the name of this design, we call this ball as a buckybuckyball, or level-2 buckyball. Since we can again use this buckyball as a new type of beads to create the next level of buckybuckybuckyball (level-3 buckyball), continuing in this direction recursively, we can have a very complicated fractal structure of Sierpinski type. Also, this kind of artwork containing hidden recursive structures has been first used Escher in his amazing artworks, so it is not a bad idea to call this kind of buckyball as Escher's buckyball, or Escher's ball.

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