My fullerene page was the first webpage I made, in 1998. The C programs whose output is shown there – to enumerate pentagon-hexagon topologies, and to estimate their 3D shapes – were lost years ago; I wanted to improve and extend them anyway.

I’ve worked on the new search program (in Python) at long intervals. Last weekend, a version with all the essential features ran, up to 24 faces. The bad news is that the file of partial solutions – on which the program would have built to proceed to 32 faces, and so on – was 5 gigabytes. I’ll need a more efficient way to handle partials, or else to abandon the concept.