Related papers: Pach's animal problem within the bounding box
If a collection of identical particles is poured into a container, different shapes will fill to different densities. But what is the shape that fills a container as close as possible to a pre-specified, desired density? We demonstrate a…
We study the problem of folding a polyomino $P$ into a polycube $Q$, allowing faces of $Q$ to be covered multiple times. First, we define a variety of folding models according to whether the folds (a) must be along grid lines of $P$ or can…
Given a category of objects, it is both useful and important to know if all the objects in the category may be realised as sub-objects -- via morphisms in the given category -- of a single object in that category enjoying some nice…
In micro- and nano-scale systems, particles can be moved by using an external force like gravity or a magnetic field. In the presence of adhesive particles that can attach to each other, the challenge is to decide whether a shape is…
We introduce snowballs, which are compact sets in $\R^3$ homeomorphic to the unit ball. They are 3-dimensional analogs of domains in the plane bounded by snowflake curves. For each snowball $B$ a quasiconformal map $f\colon \R^3\to \R^3$ is…
The Snake-in-the-Box problem is that of finding a longest induced path in an $n$-dimensional hypercube. We prove new lower bounds for the values $n\in \{11,12,13\}$. The Coil-in-the-Box problem is that of finding a longest induced cycle in…
More than 50 years ago, Laszlo Fuchs asked which abelian groups can be the group of units of a commutative ring. Though progress has been made, the question remains open. We provide an answer to this question in the case of indecomposable…
The abelian sandpile model is a simple combinatorial model for critical behaviour which has the "abelian property" that the order in which we make moves does not change the final outcome of the game. This might seem to restrict the model's…
We consider the problem of the unification modulo an equational theory ACh, which consists of a function symbol $h$ that is homomorphic over an associative-commutative operator $+$. Since the unification modulo ACh theory is undecidable, we…
Which polyominoes can be folded into a cube, using only creases along edges of the square lattice underlying the polyomino, with fold angles of $\pm 90^\circ$ and $\pm 180^\circ$, and allowing faces of the cube to be covered multiple times?…
In this note, we try to understand the recent development on the Waring-Goldbach problem involving cubes of primes. Especially, we want to determine whether integers that are either primes, squares of primes, cubes of primes, or a cube of…
Modern 3D printing technologies and the upcoming mass-customization paradigm call for efficient methods to produce and distribute arbitrarily-shaped 3D objects. This paper introduces an original algorithm to split a 3D model in parts that…
We analyze the non-relativistic problem of a quantum particle that bounces back and forth between two moving walls. We recast this problem into the equivalent one of a quantum particle in a fixed box whose dynamics is governed by an…
We study a new construction of bodies from a given convex body in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ which are isomorphic to (weighted) floating bodies. We establish several properties of this new construction, including its relation to $p$-affine surface…
Various authors have calculated how many pairwise incomparable points can be selected from a partially ordered set. We tackle this question for the family of subsets of a finite set obtained by removing or adding a bounded number of…
We give a more geometric approach to an algorithm for deciding whether two hyperbolic 3-manifolds are homeomorphic. We also give a more algebraic approach to the homeomorphism problem for geometric, but non-hyperbolic, 3-manifolds.
Given a palette of six colors, a colored cube is a cube where each face is colored with exactly one color and each color appears on some face. Starting with an arbitrary collection of unit length colored cubes, one can try to arrange a…
A 3D rep-tile is a compact 3-manifold $X$ in $\mathbb{R}^3$ that can be decomposed into finitely many pieces, each of which are similar to $X$, and all of which are congruent to each other. In this paper we classify all 3D rep-tiles up to…
Each packing of R^d by translates of the unit cube [0,1)^d admits a decomposition into at most two parts such that if a translate of the unit cube is covered by one of them, then it also belongs to such a part.
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…