Fast-forward to my fourth year at UW, and while strolling around a big bookstore I came across Synergetics by Fuller. Now here was an interesting thick book full of diagrams and lots of text. Fuller was extremely obsessive about things, and Synergetics has all of its lines numbered so that future generations could refer to individual passages, sort of like the Bible.

If you ever want to get a mathematician confused, let them have a look at Synergetics. It's got sort of the look of a math book but it's also chock full of very long and often convoluted sentences. I began to shop the book around a bit, showing my fellow math-heads and everybody scoffed at it, saying that it wasn't mathematics. So then I showed it to some artists and their reaction was similar: that's not art! Still the contents were fascinating, and since neither the math people nor the art people could value it I became all the more fascinated.

Before you go off and read Synergetics, I can recommend picking up Amy Edmondson's book A Fuller Explanation, which is a lot shorter and easier to consume.

Fuller was putting spatial geometry at the core of everything, however strange that sounds. The Geometry of Thinking. I found myself always returning to this stuff, because I liked the idea of thinking in terms of structures that could be built and played with. I built all kinds of geometrical structures and had them hanging around the house.

The funniest things was when I got into contact with a group of Bucky Fuller enthusiasts on the internet, because when I finally went to meet a number of them in real life (years later!) they all lived in houses full of geometrical structures.

There were others like me!