C168

C168 is quite uniqe because it correponds to C60 in the hyperbolic space.
We can view standard fullerenes as a tiling of graphene sheet on a sphere, which is a two-dimensional manifold with postive curvature everywhere. C60 corresponds to the smallest fullerene with all pentagons separated by only one CC bond. Similarly, C168 is the smallest fullerene in a hyperbolic space with all heptagons separated by only one CC bond.

In the bead model I created, purple beads stand for the edges of heptagons, and white beads are the CC bonds separating different heptagons.

From Dec 25, 2008

(I gave this model to Dirk Huylebrouck, a professor in the department of architecture at Sint Lucas (Brussels, Belgium) at the Bridges Pecs, Hungary 2010)