In chemistry, what 60-atom carbon molecule is named after Buckminster Fuller?

The 60-atom carbon molecule named after Buckminster Fuller is buckminsterfullerene, with the chemical formula C60.

Its molecule is a hollow carbon cage shaped like a truncated icosahedron—the geometry popularly associated with a football or soccer ball. It contains 20 hexagonal faces and 12 pentagonal faces, with one carbon atom at each of the 60 vertices. This distinctive shape led to the informal nickname “buckyball.”

The name honors American architect, designer, and futurist Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes used networks of triangles to create strong, lightweight structures. The resemblance is conceptual rather than exact: a geodesic dome is a large engineered framework, while C60 is a molecular cage made of fused carbon rings.

C60 was identified in 1985 by Harold Kroto, Robert Curl, Richard Smalley, and their collaborators at Rice University. Their discovery established the fullerene family of carbon allotropes and earned Kroto, Curl, and Smalley the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Graphite, diamond, and graphene are also carbon forms, but none has the C60 buckyball cage.