Richard Buckminster Bucky Fuller has been described as one of the transcending theorists and innovative thinkers of the 20th Century. While Fuller lectured around the world, he was also a professor at SIUC from 1959-1971.

Outgoing SIU Chancellor James Brown said Fuller’s way of thinking was an inspiration to many people.

He was obviously a man of great intellect, he said. He put together usual ideas in an unusual way and came forth with striking kinds of expressions of concepts.

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Fuller is most widely known for his groundbreaking 1949 invention of the geodesic dome, a self-supporting structure providing a maximum amount of indoor space in relation to outside surface area.

The dome could withstand amazingly large amounts of weight and was hailed as a genuine advance in architecture and design by Fuller’s scientific peers.

Fuller is also credited with the invention of the Dymaxion map, a flat map accurately depicting the size and distance of the continents from each other, and the Dymaxion automobile, a three-wheeled car that can turn a corner in a space smaller than its length. However, these inventions never received large-scale commercial acceptance because of Fuller’s past.

During that period Fuller was a self-described social outcast, never taken seriously because of his alcoholic tendencies. He quit drinking during World War II and proceeded to design the geodesic dome.

Fuller coined the phrase Spaceship Earth and warned of its demise due to technological ignorance. Able to speak on demand for hours, Fuller gave thousands of lectures and received 47 honorary doctorates from institutions including Harvard, the University of Wisconsin and New England State University. Before Fuller’s death in 1983, Ronald Reagan awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award given by the United States.

Brown said President Delyte Morris brought Bucky here in 1959 as a research professor for the design department as a strategy to make the University a more intellectually-based school.

(Morris) felt Bucky Fuller, although not a recognized academic, was certainly a man of

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