Remembering Sir Harold Kroto

Harry Kroto was a co-winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley. Sir Harold (although he much preferred Harry) anticipated that the heat of stars in distant space organized 60 carbon molecules into a specific patter of hexagons and pentagons. He and his fellow scientists were able to reproduce C60 in the laboratory and it took the shape of a soccer ball or geodesic dome. In honor of Buckminster Fuller they called the C60 structure the “buckeyball” and “fullerene”. They are critical to studying nanotechnology.