English

On compact packings of the plane with circles of three radii

Metric Geometry 2019-07-30 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

A compact circle-packing PP of the Euclidean plane is a set of circles which bound mutually disjoint open discs with the property that, for every circle SPS\in P, there exists a maximal indexed set {A0,,An1}P\{A_{0},\ldots,A_{n-1}\}\subseteq P so that, for every i{0,,n1}i\in\{0,\ldots,n-1\}, the circle AiA_{i} is tangent to both circles SS and Ai+1modn.A_{i+1\mod n}. We show that there exist at most 1361713617 pairs (r,s)(r,s) with 0<s<r<10<s<r<1 for which there exist a compact circle-packing of the plane consisting of circles with radii ss, rr and 11. We discuss computing the exact values of such 0<s<r<10<s<r<1 as roots of polynomials and exhibit a selection of compact circle-packings consisting of circles of three radii. We also discuss the apparent infeasibility of computing \emph{all} these values on contemporary consumer hardware with the methods employed in this paper.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1709.03487,
  title  = {On compact packings of the plane with circles of three radii},
  author = {Miek Messerschmidt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.03487},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Dataset referred to in the text can be obtained at http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/t66sfkn5tn.1