Related papers: The strong thirteen spheres problem

The problem of twelve spheres is to understand, as a function of $r \in (0,r_{max}(12)]$, the configuration space of $12$ non-overlapping equal spheres of radius $r$ touching a central unit sphere. It considers to what extent, and in what…

The Tammes problem is to find the arrangement of N points on a unit sphere which maximizes the minimum distance between any two points. This problem is presently solved for several values of N, namely for N=3,4,6,12 by L. Fejes Toth (1943);…

The kissing number k(3) is the maximal number of equal size nonoverlapping spheres in three dimensions that can touch another sphere of the same size. This number was the subject of a famous discussion between Isaac Newton and David Gregory…

Various packing problems and simulations of hard and soft interacting particles, such as microscopic models of nematic liquid crystals, reduce to calculations of intersections and pair interactions between ellipsoids. When constrained to a…

Recently, we enumerate up to isometry, all locally rigid circle packings on the unit sphere with number of circles N<12. This problem is equivalent to the enumeration of irreducible contact graphs. In this paper we show that by using the…

The kissing number problem asks for the maximal number k(n) of equal size nonoverlapping spheres in n-dimensional space that can touch another sphere of the same size. This problem in dimension three was the subject of a famous discussion…

All possible non-isomorphic arrangements of 12 spheres kissing a central sphere (the Gregory-Newton problem) are obtained for the sticky-hard-sphere (SHS) model, and subsequently projected by geometry optimization onto a set of structures…

In discrete geometry, the contact number of a given finite number of non-overlapping spheres was introduced as a generalization of Newton's kissing number. This notion has not only led to interesting mathematics, but has also found…

A problem that is simple to state in the context of spherical geometry, and that seems rather interesting, appears to have been unexamined to date in the mathematical literature. The problem can also be recast as a problem in the real…

The following problem was proposed in 2010 by S. Lando. Let $M$ and $N$ be two unions of the same number of disjoint circles in a sphere. Do there always exist two spheres in 3-space such that their intersection is transversal and is a…

Consider a polygon P and all neighboring circles (circles going through three consecutive vertices of P). We say that a neighboring circle is extremal if it is empty (no vertices of P inside) or full (no vertices of P outside). It is well…

Let $N$ denote the maximum number of congruent infinite cylinders that can be arranged in $\mathbb{R}^3$ so that every pair of cylinders touches each other. Littlewood posed the question of whether $N=7$, which remains unsolved. In this…

Since Isaac Newton first studied the Kissing Number Problem in 1694, determining the maximal number of non-overlapping spheres around a central sphere has remained a fundamental challenge. This problem is the local analogue of Hilbert's…

A recent generalization of the Erd\H{o}s Unit Distance Problem, proposed by Palsson, Senger and Sheffer, asks for the maximum number of unit distance paths with a given number of vertices in the plane and in $3$-space. Studying a variant of…

Let $C(n)$ be the solution to the contact number problem, i.e., the maximum number of touching pairs among any packing of $n$ congruent spheres in $\mathbb{R}^3$. We prove the long conjectured values of $C(6)=12, C(7)=15$, and $C(8)=18$.…

Continuing the investigations of Harborth (1974) and the author (2002) we study the following two rather basic problems on sphere packings. Recall that the contact graph of an arbitrary finite packing of unit balls (i.e., of an arbitrary…

Considering a finite intersection of balls and a finite union of other balls in an Euclidean space, we propose an exact method to test whether the intersection is covered by the union. We reformulate this problem into quadratic programming…

Packing problems, which ask how to arrange a collection of objects in space to meet certain criteria, are important in a great many physical and biological systems, where geometrical arrangements at small scales control behaviour at larger…

We bound the number of incidences between points and spheres in finite vector spaces by bounding the sum of the number of points in the pairwise intersections of the spheres. We obtain new incidence bounds that are interesting when the…

A famous result of Hausdorff states that a sphere with countably many points removed can be partitioned into three pieces A,B,C such that A is congruent to B (i.e., there is an isometry of the sphere which sends A to B), B is congruent to…