Geodesic dome Zeiss plant in Jena, Germany. A larger dome, called "The Wonder of Jena", opened to the public in July 1926. Some 20 years later, R. Buckminster Fuller named the dome "geodesic" from field experiments with artist Kenneth Snelson at Black Mountain College in 1948 and 1949. Although Fuller was not the original inventor, he is credited with the U.S. popularization of the idea for which he received U.S. patent 2,682,235 29 June 1954. The geodesic dome appealed to Fuller because it was extremely strong for its weight, its "omnitriangulated" surface provided an inherently stable structure, and because a sphere encloses
Geodesic deviation "geodesic". The "geodesic deviation equation" relates the Riemann curvature tensor to the relative acceleration of two neighboring geodesics. In differential geometry, the geodesic deviation equation is more commonly known as the Jacobi equation. To quantify geodesic deviation, one begins by setting up a family of closely spaced geodesics indexed by a continuous variable "s" and parametrized by an affine parameter τ. That is, for each fixed "s", the curve swept out by γ(τ) as τ varies is a geodesic. When considering the geodesic of a massive object, it is often convenient to choose τ to be the object's proper time.