R. Buckminster Fuller, the forward-looking inventor best known
as the father of the geodesic dome, died of a heart attack
Friday in Los Angeles at the Good Samaritan Hospital while
visiting his wife, who is critically ill. He was 87 years old,
and lived in Pacific Palisades, Calif.  As he put it himself,
with his customary cheerful immodesty, Mr. Fuller was an ''an
engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer,
philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, comprehensive designer and
choreographer.''  He was also a thoroughgoing original, who for
many years was dismissed by many as something of a crackpot. But
by the 1950's, having stubbornly refused to abandon his beliefs
that through technology ''man can do anything he needs to do''
and that ''man can create miracles,'' he had attracted a
cultlike following.  Well into his 70's, Mr. Fuller yearly flew
tens of thousands of miles, giving college lectures, some of
which extended to a nonstop five or six hours. He was enormously
popular among young people, whom h