Related papers: From the separable Tammes problem to extremal dist…
The thirteen spheres problem is asking if 13 equal size nonoverlapping spheres in three dimensions can touch another sphere of the same size. This problem was the subject of the famous discussion between Isaac Newton and David Gregory in…
The exploration of the densest sphere packings is a fundamental problem in mathematics and a wide variety of sciences including materials science. We present our exhaustive computational exploration of the densest ternary sphere packings…
We have discovered a new family of three-dimensional crystal sphere packings that are strictly jammed (i.e., mechanically stable) and yet possess an anomalously low density. This family constitutes an uncountably infinite number of crystal…
Apollonian circle packings arise by repeatedly filling the interstices between mutually tangent circles with further tangent circles. In Euclidean space it is possible for every circle in such a packing to have integer radius of curvature,…
We study the optimal packing of hard spheres in an infinitely long cylinder, using simulated annealing, and compare our results with the analogous problem of packing disks on the unrolled surface of a cylinder. The densest structures are…
We study packings of $n$ hard spheres of equal radius in the $d$-dimensional unit cube. We present a nonsmooth function whose local extrema are the radii of jammed packings (where no subset of spheres can be moved keeping all others fixed)…
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 study the problem of gravitational lensing by binary galaxies, idealized as two isothermal spheres. In a wide binary, each galaxy possesses individual tangential, nearly astroidal, caustics and roundish radial caustics. As the separation…
We provide a complete classification of possible configurations of mutually pairwise touching infinite cylinders in Euclidian 3D space. It turns out that there is a maximum number of such cylinders possible in 3D independently on the shape…
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…
Using a Lubachevsky-Stillinger-like growth algorithm combined with biased SWAP Monte Carlo and transient degrees of freedom, we generate ultradense disordered jammed ellipse packings. For all aspect ratios $\alpha$, these packings exhibit…
Let B_1,B_2 be balls in finite-dimensional real vector spaces E_1,E_2, centered around unit length vectors v_1,v_2 and not containing zero. An element in the tensor product space E_1 \otimes E_2 is called B_1 \otimes B_2-separable if it is…
The densest local packings of N three-dimensional identical nonoverlapping spheres within a radius Rmin(N) of a fixed central sphere of the same size are obtained for selected values of N up to N = 1054. In the predecessor to this paper…
This article sketches the proofs of two theorems about sphere packings in Euclidean 3-space. The first is K. Bezdek's strong dodecahedral conjecture: the surface area of every bounded Voronoi cell in a packing of balls of radius 1 is at…
Apollonian circle packings arise by repeatedly filling the interstices between four mutually tangent circles with further tangent circles. Such packings can be described in terms of the Descartes configurations they contain. It observed…
Let H be a closed half-space of n-dimensional Euclidean space. Suppose S is a unit sphere in H that touches the supporting hyperplane of H. The one-sided kissing number B(n) is the maximal number of unit nonoverlapping spheres in H that can…
This is the second in a series of papers 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 the…
We consider here the $3$-sphere $\mathbf S^3$ seen as the boundary at infinity of the complex hyperbolic plane $\mathbf{H}^2_{\mathbf C}$. It comes equipped with a contact structure and two classes of special curves. First $\mathbf…
Apollonian circle packings arise by repeatedly filling the interstices between mutually tangent circles with further tangent circles. It is possible for every circle in such a packing to have integer radius of curvature, and we call such a…
Methodology is provided towards the solution of the minimum enclosing ball problem. This problem concerns the determination of the unique spherical surface of smallest radius enclosing a given bounded set in the d-dimensional Euclidean…