Postal Codes

The purpose of this project is to generate a strategic list of postal codes (in this case, US ZIP codes) such that if the minimum possible number of postal codes were given a roughly 25 mile surrounding radius, the entire country would be covered with minimal or no likely gaps. The ultimate purpose is to generate a minimum list of postal codes that would effectively cover a whole country (in this case, just the US lower 48) if used to query mapping APIs that often require the submission of a zip code and return locations within an arbitrary radius (20-25 miles is a typical option in such APIs). Essentially, its intended purpose is for scraping mapping APIs to collect (nearly) nationwide map data.