As well as being an uber-geek who was head-hunted by Google, Neil is a bit of a Meccano guru. Here is his blog post about building a 3G centrifuge to see if lava lamps would work on Jupiter:

http://neil.fraser.name/news/2010/03/03/

I believe it's Meccano - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccano

I still regret letting my parents give away my meccano collection. It's fantastic for quickly prototyping usable things.

Meccano.

Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0S4tOd3A0k (James May's Toy Stories episode covering Meccano)

It doesn't look like LEGO. Probably a few metal brackets and some pins from a hardware store.

I'd be interesting in the mathematical details myself. Computer-reliant optimizations are so interesting. . .

Looks almost like Erector set pieces.