Area high school students to build large geometric structure from springs and brass tubes at Cornell Dec. 9

Contact: Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.
Office: 607-255-3290

Computer-generated image of a tensegrity framework

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Euclid, the father of geometry, would have been proud.

High school students from the Ithaca area who are members of Cornell University's Mathematics Explorers Club will build a desk-size geometric structure -- called a tensegrity -- made of brass tubes, springs and screw-eyes on Dec. 9, at 10:30 a.m., in the Commons Room, fifth floor, Mallott Hall, on campus. The assembly will take about an hour. Taking part will be about 10 students from Ithaca area high schools.

Robert Connelly, Cornell professor of mathematics and one of the mentors for the club, explains that a tensegrity framework is an ordered, finite collection of points in Euclidean space, called a configuration. Certain pairs of these points, called cables (the springs), are bound in a way that they cannot move farther apart. There are other pairs of these points, called struts (the brass tubes), constrained so that they do not move closer together. The screw eyes (the vertices) provide the turning points for the tensegrity's struts. This can produce a structure of super stability and rigidity, says Connelly

"The final structure will be quite pleasing to look at, I think. It should be quite stable and it should last more or less indefinitely," says Connelly. "Actually, there are a lot of methods that have been used by a lot of different people to build tensegrities. American artist Kenneth Snelson builds large works that are quite spectacular. There is a kit, called Tensegritoy, that has wooden struts, elastic cables, and plastic caps for the vertices. But the club's screw-eyes, springs and brass tubes make this quite novel," he notes.

The late Buckminster Fuller, the notable architect and engineer, coined the term "tensegrity," which means the structure has tension and integrity. "There has to be tension with integrity, or else things fall down," says Connelly. Snelson's artistic work with tensegrities can be seen around the world. His "Needle Tower" adorns the front of the Smithsonian Institution's Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

The Cornell Mathematics Explorers Club is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

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