Elisabetta Matsumoto; Henry Segerman
Elisabetta Matsumoto is an Assistant Professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is passionate about using textiles, 3D printing and virtual reality to teach geometry and topology to the public.
Henry Segerman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Oklahoma State University. His interests include geometry and topology, 3D printing, virtual reality and spherical video.
The gears on this version of Buckminster Fuller's jitterbug mechanism help to keep the parts aligned, making the movement smoother. The jitterbug mechanism expands from an octahedral shape to become cuboctahedral. A variant jitterbug mechanism is based on the cuboctahedron, expanding to become a rhombicuboctahedron. For this mechanism the rotation rates of the triangular and square parts are not linearly related to each other. This means that the gears are not circular.