The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1996 was awarded jointly to Robert F. Curl Jr., Sir Harold W. Kroto and Richard E. Smalley "for their discovery of fullerenes".
 

A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. Spherical fullerenes are also called buckyballs, and cylindrical ones are called carbon nanotubes or buckytubes. The discovery of fullerenes greatly expanded the number of known carbon allotropes, which until recently were limited to graphite, diamond, and amorphous carbon such as soot and charcoal. As the discovery of the fullerene family came after buckminsterfullerene, the shortened name 'fullerene' was used to refer to the family of fullerenes.
 

Since the discovery of fullerenes in 1985, structural variations on fullerenes have evolved well beyond the individual clusters themselves. Examples include: buckyball clusters, Nanotubes, Megatubes, polymers, nano"onions", "ball-and-chain" dimers.