Related papers: On the honeycomb conjecture and the Kepler problem
The Honeycomb Conjecture states that among tilings with unit area cells in the Euclidean plane, the average perimeter of a cell is minimal for a regular hexagonal tiling. This conjecture was proved by L. Fejes T\'oth for convex tilings, and…
The honeycomb problem on the sphere asks for the perimeter-minimizing partition of the sphere into N equal areas. This article solves the problem when N=12. The unique minimizer is a tiling of 12 regular pentagons in the dodecahedral…
We prove that the planar hexagonal honeycomb is asymptotically optimal for a large class of optimal partition problems, in which the cells are assumed to be convex, and the criterion is to minimize either the sum or the maximum among the…
The classical honeycomb conjecture asserts that any partition of the plane into regions of equal area has perimeter at least that of the regular hexagonal honeycomb tiling. Pappus discusses this problem in his preface to Book V. This paper…
We raise and investigate the following problem that one can regard as a very close relative of the densest sphere packing problem. If the Euclidean 3-space is partitioned into convex cells each containing a unit ball, how should the shapes…
We review the regular tilings of d-sphere, Euclidean d-space, hyperbolic d-space and Coxeter's regular hyperbolic honeycombs (with infinite or star-shaped cells or vertex figures) with respect of possible embedding, isometric up to a scale,…
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…
Lebesgue's universal covering problem is re-examined using computational methods. This leads to conjectures about the nature of the solution which if correct could provide a blueprint for a complete solution. Empirical lower bounds for the…
In an Euclidean $d$-space, the container problem asks to pack $n$ equally sized spheres into a minimal dilate of a fixed container. If the container is a smooth convex body and $d\geq 2$ we show that solutions to the container problem can…
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. The original proof, announced in 1998 and published in 2006, is long and…
Motivated by modern applications like image processing and wireless sensor networks, we consider a variation of the famous Kepler Conjecture. Given any infinite set of unit balls covering the whole space, we want to know the optimal (lim…
We show that the minimal number of skewed hyperplanes that cover the hypercube $\{0,1\}^{n}$ is at least $\frac{n}{2}+1$, and there are infinitely many $n$'s when the hypercube can be covered with $n-\log_{2}(n)+1$ skewed hyperplanes. The…
Minimal surfaces and domain walls play important roles in various contexts of spacetime physics as well as material science. In this paper, we first review the Bernstein conjecture, which asserts that a plane is the only globally well…
We prove that, in the limit as $k \to+ \infty$, the hexagonal honeycomb solves the optimal partition problem in which the criterion is minimizing the largest among the Cheeger constants of $k$ mutually disjoint cells in a planar domain. As…
This is the eighth and final paper in a series giving a proof of the Kepler conjecture, which asserts that the density of a packing of congruent spheres in three dimensions is never greater than $\pi/\sqrt{18}\approx 0.74048...$. This is…
We prove that the optimal cluster problem for the sum of the first Robin eigenvalue of the Laplacian, in the limit of a large number of convex cells, is asymptotically solved by (the Cheeger sets of) the honeycomb of regular hexagons. The…
We provide conjectural necessary and (separately) sufficient conditions for the Hilbert scheme of points of a given length to have the maximum dimension tangent space at a point. The sufficient condition is claimed for 3D and reduces the…
We solve a long-standing open problem about the optimal codebook structure of codes in $n$-dimensional Euclidean space that consist of $n+1$ codewords subject to a codeword energy constraint, in terms of minimizing the average decoding…
A small variation of the circular shape of the hodograph theorem states that for every elliptical solution of the two-body problem, it is possible to find an appropriate inertial frame such that the speed of the bodies is constant. We use…
We show that among any $n$ points in the unit cube one can find a triangle of area at most $n^{-2/3-c}$ for some absolute constant $c >0$. This gives the first non-trivial upper bound for the three-dimensional version of Heilbronn's…