Buckyballs (née Truncated Icosahedra)
The truncated icosahedron is, of course, one of the standard Archimedean polyhedra. However, it and related shapes were popularized first by Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, by its use in the design of soccer balls, and then more recently by the discovery of Carbon molecules in this shape. The molecules were named Buckminsterfullerene, or buckyballs for short, and since then the name has attached itself to the geometric shape as well.
Breaking Bonds. Geometric sculpture by Stephen Luecking combining buckyball, hexagon, and amorphous shapes of carbon molecules.
The Graph of the Truncated Icosahedron and the Last Letter of Galois, B. Kostant, Not. AMS, Sep. 1995. Group theoretic mathematics of buckyballs. See also J. Baez's review of Kostant's paper.
High school buckyball art. Kerry Stefancyk, Allison Cahill, and Jessica Smith make polyhedral models out of stained glass.
Models of Platonic solids and related symmetric polyhedra such as the truncated icosahedron.
Truncated icosahedral symmetry. Explains why you might want to use a machined aluminum buckyball as a gravity-wave detector...
270-strut tensegrity sphere. Jim Leftwich makes polyhedra out of dowels and hairbands.
Zometool truncated icosahedron image from the A2Z science and learning store catalog. This looks to me like a raytrace rather than a real model.
