Graphitic gyroid surface

Chuang is currently working on the G-surface through his recently developed construction scheme based on helicoidal building blocks.

More photos taken in ICCE

I found a site (高中化學學科中心, 雄女) which contains many photos taken on the workshop I gave in the International Conference on Chemical Education(ICCE) last summer:
(化學、幾何、藝術：建構芙類分子的串珠模型 地點:台北國際會議廳| 2010/8/13).

Talk on beaded molecules

【化學奇境】一線千珠走入分子世界 （[Chemistry Wonderland] Peering into Molecular World with A Long Thread and Thousand Beads）

Chiral cube - the generalized Goldberg polyhedra

Chern Chuang discovered that one can generalize the Goldberg polyhedra to those polyhedra consisting of square grids, instead of triangular or hexagonal grids. Accordingly, the following polyhedron can be classified as the generalized Goldberg vector (3,1); while the cuboctahedron and rombicuboctahedron as shown in the previous posts can be classified as (1,1) and (2,0), respectively.

Cuboctahedron & Rhombicuboctahedron

Slides for making a beaded C60

I would like to thank Rochelle for pointing out that the procedure in the tabular form I posted before is incorrect. I have to admit that I have never used this kind of table for making C60. I think it is easy to make mistakes by just following this table literally and without thinking. If you are a little bit careful, you should be able to see the hidden rules for making the C60 just after about 10 steps.

Below is a few slides I used to teach people how to make a buckyball.


But, it is much easier to follow the simple mnemonic for making a buckyball.


If one wants to make a beaded C₆₀ with two different colors, a single color for pentagons and two different colors alternatively for hexagons, one can use these two colors as a mnemonic for deciding whether one need to make a pentagon or hexagon in the next step. Remember that in a C₆₀ every pentagon is surrounded by 5 hexagons and every hexagon is surrounded by 3 pentagons and 3 hexagons alternatively. Then one can start with a pentagon with a single color, then hexagons with two colors alternatively, eventually, one should get a beaded C₆₀ correctly without using any other information.