English

The Voronoi Cell in a saturated Circle Packing and an elementary proof of Thue's theorem

History and Overview 2019-05-16 v1 Metric Geometry

Abstract

The famous Kepler conjecture has a less spectacular, two-dimensional equivalent: The theorem of Thue states that the densest circle packing in the Euclidean plane has a hexagonal structure. A common proof uses Voronoi cells and analyzes their area applying Jensen's inequality on convex functions to receive a local estimate which is globally valid. Based on the concept of Voronoi cells, we will introduce a new tessellation into so-called L-triangles which can be related to fundamental parallelograms of lattice circle packings. Therefore a globally disordered circle packing can be reduced to locally ordered configurations: We will show how the theorem of Lagrange on lattice circle packings can be applied to non-lattice circle packings. Thus we receive a new proof of Thue's theorem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.05837,
  title  = {The Voronoi Cell in a saturated Circle Packing and an elementary proof of Thue's theorem},
  author = {Max Leppmeier},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.05837},
  year   = {2019}
}