Construction of fullerenes

Abstract

We present an infinite series of operations on fullerenes generalizing the Endo-Kroto operation, such that each combinatorial fullerene is obtained from the dodecahedron by a sequence of such operations. We prove that these operations are invertible in the proper sense, and are compositions of (1;4,5)-, (1;5,5)-, (2,6;4,5)-, (2,6;5,5)-, (2,6;5,6)-, (2,7;5,5)-, and (2,7;5,6)-truncations, where each truncation increases the number of hexagons by one.