A crystal net is an infinite molecular model of a crystal. Similar models existed in Antiquity, notably the atomic theory associated with Democritus, which was criticized by Aristotle because such a theory entails a vacuum, which Aristotle believed nature abhors. Modern atomic theory traces back to Johannes Kepler and his work on geometric packing problems. Until the twentieth century, graph-like models of crystals focused on the positions of the (atomic) components, and these pre-20th century models were the focus of two controversies in chemistry and materials science.
The two controversies were (1) the controversy over Robert Boyle’s corpuscular theory of matter, which held that all material substances were composed of particles, and (2) the controversy over whether crystals were minerals or some kind of vegetative phenomenon. During the eighteenth century, Kepler, Nicolas Steno, René Just Haüy, and others gradually associated the packing of Boyle-type corpuscular units into arrays with the apparent emergence of polyhedral structures resembling crystals as a result. During the nineteenth century, there was considerably more work done on polyhedra and also of crystal structure, notably in the derivation of the Crystallographic groups based on the assumption that a crystal could be regarded as a regular array of unit cells. During the early twentieth century, the physics and chemistry community largely accepted Boyle's corpuscular theory of matter—by now called the atomic theory—and X-ray crystallography was used to determine the position of the atomic or molecular components within the unit cells (by the early twentieth century, unit cells were regarded as physically meaningful).
However, despite the growing use of stick-and-ball molecular models, the use of graphical edges or line segments to represent chemical bonds in specific crystals have become popular more recently, and the publication of encouraged efforts to determine graphical structures of known crystals, to generate crystal nets of as yet unknown crystals, and to synthesize crystals of these novel crystal nets. The coincident expansion of interest in tilings and tessellations, especially those modeling quasicrystals, and the development of modern Nanotechnology, all facilitated by the dramatic increase in computational power, enabled the development of algorithms from computational geometry for the construction and analysis of crystal nets. Meanwhile, the ancient association between models of crystals and tessellations has expanded with Algebraic topology. There is also a thread of interest in the very-large-scale integration (VLSI) community for using these crystal nets as circuit designs.