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I've read a bunch of his books and found both his engineering and philosophical ideas deeply inspiring and useful in my work as an engineer and scientist and in
by _yb2s 2y ago
I've read a bunch of his books and found both his engineering and philosophical ideas deeply inspiring and useful in my work as an engineer and scientist and in my hobby as a sailor- his deep understanding of geometry and tension, etc. has allowed me to build novel sail rigs and systems.
Fuller was awarded a huge number of patents on his inventions- and although mostly impractical, they are quite certainly new inventions of his own design.
I think it is quite likely that he was as narcissist, in that he worked hard to project an image of himself as a certain type of person, but I also think the type of creative out of the box thinker he actually was, tends to be labeled as a charlatan by people with authoritarian personalities.
- drewcoo 2y agoIf the random Deepak Chopra generator included some trigonometry, we'd have Bucky Fuller. http://www.wisdomofchopra.com http://www.wisdomofchopra.com Without context, that can be inspiring. But that doesn't make it meaningful.
- _yb2s 2y agoIndeed something could be inspiring without being meaningful, but that isn't what I am talking about- I am talking about ideas that are specifically useful insights- inspiring because they pointed me to a useful solution to a real problem, or to navigate a technical problem in a different way that led to a solution. For me his most functionally useful and inspiring ideas have been in the realm of philosophy of engineering- he has a process for thinking about problems that avoids a lot of pitfalls that cause people to reject new or weird ideas. His ideas are concrete, specific, and very well thought out- he is a brilliant guy. If you've read his books and they seem like Chopra mixed with math jargon, and you can't see how they are useful for real world engineering problems, you are simply not understanding him.