Related papers: The kissing number in four dimensions

We improve the previously best known upper bounds on the sizes of $\theta$-spherical codes for every $\theta<\theta^*\approx 62.997^{\circ}$ at least by a factor of $0.4325$, in sufficiently high dimensions. Furthermore, for sphere packing…

Recent years have seen significant advances in the study of symmetric informationally complete (SIC) quantum measurements, also known as maximal sets of complex equiangular lines. Previously, the published record contained solutions up to…

It is well-known that the densest lattice sphere packings also typically have large kissing numbers. The sphere packing density maximization problem is known to have a solution among well-rounded lattices, of which the integer lattice…

In this paper, we prove a geometrical inequality which states that for any four points on a hemisphere with the unit radius, the largest sum of distances between the points is 4+4*sqrt(2). In our method, we have constructed a rectangular…

In the first part of the paper, we consider the relation between kissing number and the secrecy gain. We show that on an $n=24m+8k$-dimensional even unimodular lattice, if the shortest vector length is $\geq 2m$, then as the number of…

We consider solutions to the $4$-color problem for the vertices of sphere triangulations with degree sequence $6,...,6,4,4,4,4,4,4$. We sort these solutions into combinatorial types and show that each generic type $\tau$ is parametrized by…

The main goal of this paper is to address the following problem: given a positive integer $n$, find the largest value $S(n)$ such that a square of edge length $S(n)$ in the Euclidean plane can be covered by $n$ unit squares. We investigate…

From the Rhind Papyrus and other extant sources, we know that the ancient Egyptians were very iterested in expressing a given fraction into a sum of unit fractions, that is fractions whose numerators are equal to 1. One of the problems that…

The Sausage Catastrophe of J. Wills (1983) is the observation that in $d=3$ and $d=4$, the densest packing of $n$ spheres in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ is a sausage for small values of $n$ and jumps to a full-dimensional packing for large $n$ without…

We give a new upper bound $K_+$ on the number of totally elastic collisions of $n$ hard spheres with equal radii and equal masses in $R^d$. Our bound satisfies $\log K_+ \leq c(d) n \log n$.

We study the diametric problem (i.e., optimal anticodes) in the space of permutations under the Ulam distance. That is, let $S_n$ denote the set of permutations on $n$ symbols, and for each $\sigma, \tau \in S_n$, define their Ulam distance…

We consider the classical $n$-queens problem, which asks how many ways one can place $n$ mutually non-attacking queens on an $n$ x $n$ chessboard. We prove that the total number of solutions to the $n$-queens problem $Q(n)$ is divisible by…

Let $n=2^k-1$ and $m=2^{k-2}$ for a certain $k\ge 3$. Consider the point-line geometry of $2m$-element subsets of an $n$-element set. Maximal singular subspaces of this geometry correspond to binary simplex codes of dimension $k$. For $k\ge…

We compare two naturally arising notions of unknotting number for 2-spheres in the 4-sphere: namely, the minimal number of 1-handle stabilizations needed to obtain an unknotted surface, and the minimal number of Whitney moves required in a…

The three-body problem in one-dimension with a repulsive inverse square potential between every pair was solved by Calogero. Here, the known results of supersymmetric quantum mechanics are used to propose a number of new three-body…

Neighborly cubical polytopes exist: for any $n\ge d\ge 2r+2$, there is a cubical convex d-polytope $C^n_d$ whose $r$-skeleton is combinatorially equivalent to that of the $n$-dimensional cube. This solves a problem of Babson, Billera &…

A set of lines in $\mathbb{R}^n$ is called equiangular if the angle between each pair of lines is the same. We address the question of determining the maximum size of equiangular line sets in $\mathbb{R}^n$, using semidefinite programming…

The density of a code is the fraction of the coding space covered by packing balls centered around the codewords. This paper investigates the density of codes in the complex Stiefel and Grassmann manifolds equipped with the chordal…

We consider the problem of finding the maximum number $e_d(n)$ of pairs of touching circles in a packing of $n$ congruent circles of diameter $d$ in the hyperbolic plane of curvature $-1$. In the Euclidean plane, the maximum comes from a…

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…