Word: tetrahedron
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...brainy wit as seen in sketches like "Football Comes to the University of Chicago." The routine shows a coach's unsuccessful attempt to teach four students the rules of the game. But they can't seem to operate outside of academia, referring to the football as a "demi-poly-tetrahedron...
...doing elaborate tricks. Instead, judges evaluated contestants on such technical skills as precision steering and control. Part of the problem was that kites weren't designed to let flyers do things like back spins and flips. So Wardley decided to make his own model, the Airbow, inspired by the tetrahedron-shaped kite invented by Alexander Graham Bell. At once stable and easy to fly, it allows trick flyers to perform stunts like stopping and restarting in midair. "It's like flying a helicopter instead of a plane," says Wardley. It also makes kite flying a lot more fun. INVENTOR ANDY...
...window on high-frequency beams." Divining that the compression and tension factors can be separated in any structure, he has designed a "tensegrity mast" that seems to be held up by nothing at all. But Fuller insists that with this mast combined with his frame of tetrahedron-octahedron combinations which he calls the "octet truss," he could bridge the Grand Canyon itself...
...helping to raise man's living standard still higher, and at a faster rate, Fuller has devoted his life to inventing construction systems of extreme economic efficiency, and to applying these to "livingry" rather than "weaponry." Perhaps his greatest contribution in this respect has been his work with the tetrahedron, a four-faced pyramid which Fuller has discovered to be the most resistant of all polyhedra to external pressure. By combining many tetrahedra into a spherical shape (the sphere can withstand the greatest internal pressures), Fuller constructed his geodesic dome, an extremely light and economical structure of extraordinary strength...
...tetrahedron frequently appears in nature: the spatial orientation of a carbon atom's valence electrons, for example, is tetrahedral. Fuller also noted that all three-dimensional geometric figures reduce to combinations of tetrahedra. The tetrahedron, in fact, "is the minimum system for subdividing the universe...