[Buckminster Fuller] would pretend to be deaf at the right times.

[Buckminster Fuller] would pretend to be deaf at the right times.

[My father] was always saying I'd end up like my grandfather. Okay. My grandfather was an architect, I'm an architect. It's true, certain characteristics are similar.

[Nikola Tesla and Leon Theremin] were European gentlemen, very well-mannered, all of the stuff you associate with living in Europe.

I belong to the Lovecraft Society, which meets at the University. They do things like follow in Lovecraft's footsteps, just like he followed in Edgar Allan Poe's footsteps. I mean the actual footfalls, you know, like they're going out looking for sasquatch, this kind of stuff.

I said, "Well, why do you believe in the Klein Bottle?" He said, "Because I can imagine it." I said, "You don't have to imagine a Mobius strip. It's right there in front of you!" But [Buckminster Fuller] couldn't see how that could involve a cross cap, meaning something that couldn't be reduced to a two-dimensional surface. Which it does. It's because he was thinking that the matrix was the thing that a fly could walk over the edge of, like a torus.

Stephen Hawking won [Babson Institute competition ] one year with his black hole stuff. It's keeping an open mind on whether gravity exists or not. I think my father believed this because ... when the wind blew on him, he'd get angry, because it was something he couldn't control.