Professor Sir Harry Kroto and his ’buckyball’
An internationally renowned Nobel Prize winner and graduate of the University of Sheffield visited his former University yesterday (21 June 2010) to take local school children on a scientific adventure. Professor Sir Harry Kroto, who is known world-wide as both a scientist and a charismatic motivator of young people, presented his famous `Buckyball´ Workshop to children from St Michael´s School and Birley School in Sheffield. Sir Harry was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of a new form of carbon, buckyballs. These carbon fullerene molecules are made of pentagons and hexagons and have the same shape as a traditional football. Sir Harry uses the similarity between the buckyball and a football as a way of capturing the attention of young people. The breakthrough has also recently been named by fellow academics as one of the ten most important discoveries made by their peers at UK universities in the past 60 years. The workshop saw the pupils construct their own model of the `buckyball´ using a specially provided kit.
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