The Formal Proof of the Kepler Conjecture: a critical retrospective
Metric Geometry
2024-02-14 v1
Abstract
The Kepler conjecture asserts that no packing of congruent balls in three-dimensional Euclidean space has density greater than that of the face-centered cubic packing. In 1998, Sam Ferguson and I announced a computer-assisted proof of this conjecture. Long delays in the refereeing process sparked a project to give a formal proof of the Kepler conjecture, which was completed in a large collaborative effort in 2014. This article gives a critical reappraisal of that project.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.2402.08032,
title = {The Formal Proof of the Kepler Conjecture: a critical retrospective},
author = {Thomas Hales},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.08032},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
14 pages. This article was written in 2020 for the book "Proof Assistants and Their Applications in Mathematics and Computer Science"