Related papers: Kleinian sphere packings, reflection groups, and a…
In this article we survey and describe various aspects of the geometry and arithmetic of Kleinian groups - discrete nonelementary groups of isometries of hyperbolic $3$-space. In particular we make a detailed study of two-generator groups…
This paper is an exposition, written for the Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde, about the two recent breakthrough results in the theory of sphere packings. It includes an interview with Henry Cohn, Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D. Miller, and Maryna…
This is the fifth 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 call a packing of hyperspheres in $n$ dimensions an Apollonian sphere packing if the spheres intersect tangentially or not at all; they fill the $n$-dimensional space; and every sphere in the packing is a member of a cluster of $n+2$…
Packings of identical objects have fascinated both scientists and laymen alike for centuries, in particular the sphere packings and the packings of identical regular tetrahedra. Mathematicians have tried for centuries to determine the…
The packing of hard spheres (HS) of diameter $\sigma$ in a cylinder has been used to model experimental systems, such as fullerenes in nanotubes and colloidal wire assembly. Finding the densest packings of HS under this type of confinement,…
The problem of deciding if a given triangulation of a sphere can be realized as the boundary sphere of a simplicial, convex polytope is known as the "Simplicial Steinitz problem". It is known by an indirect and non-constructive argument…
An n-dimensional analogue of the Klein bottle arose in our study of topological complexity of planar polygon spaces. We determine its integral cohomology algebra and stable homotopy type, and give an explicit immersion and embedding in…
An in-line hologram of a colloidal sphere can be analyzed with the Lorenz-Mie theory of light scattering to measure the sphere's three-dimensional position with nanometer-scale precision while also measuring its diameter and refractive…
Inversive geometry can be used to generate exactly self-similar space-filling sphere packings. We present a construction method in two dimensions and generalize it to search for packings in higher dimensions. We newly discover 29…
We develop a calculus for counting pseudoholomorphic disks with boundary in tropical Lagrangians contained in almost toric manifolds, using our previous work with Venugopalan. The results are mostly in dimension four under monotonicity…
The three dimensional structure of large packings of monosized spheres with volume fractions ranging between 0.58 and 0.64 has been studied with X-ray Computed Tomography. We search for signatures of organization, we classify local…
This is the first 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 examine packing of $n$ congruent spheres in a cube when $n$ is close but less than the number of spheres in a regular cubic close-packed (ccp) arrangement of $\lceil p^{3}/2\rceil$ spheres. For this family of packings, the previous…
During the last few years several new results on packing problems were obtained using a blend of tools from semidefinite optimization, polynomial optimization, and harmonic analysis. We survey some of these results and the techniques…
We present an efficient Monte Carlo method for the lattice sphere packing problem in d dimensions. We use this method to numerically discover de novo the densest lattice sphere packing in dimensions 9 through 20. Our method goes beyond…
This paper gives $n$-dimensional analogues of the Apollonian circle packings in parts I and II. We work in the space $\sM_{\dd}^n$ of all $n$-dimensional oriented Descartes configurations parametrized in a coordinate system,…
We present the first systematic algorithm to estimate the maximum packing density of spheres when the grain sizes are drawn from an arbitrary size distribution. With an Apollonian filling rule, we implement our technique for disks in 2d and…
Sphere packing problems have a rich history in both mathematics and physics; yet, relatively few analytical analyses of sphere packings exist, and answers to seemingly simple questions are unknown. Here, we present an analytical method for…
We compute the integer cohomology rings of the ``polygon spaces'' introduced in [Hausmann,Klyachko,Kapovich-Millson]. This is done by embedding them in certain toric varieties; the restriction map on cohomology is surjective and we…