Related papers: The kissing problem in three dimensions
Why is space 3-dimensional? The first answer to this question, entirely based on Physics, was given by Ehrenfest, in 1917, who showed that the stability requirement for $n$-dimensional two-body planetary system very strongly constrains…
Borsuk asked in 1933 if every set of diameter 1 in $R^d$ can be covered by $d+1$ sets of smaller diameter. In 1993, a negative solution, based on a theorem by Frankl and Wilson, was given by Kahn and Kalai. In this paper I will present…
We study cosmetic contact surgeries along transverse knots in the standard contact 3-sphere, i.e. contact surgeries that yield again the standard contact 3-sphere. The main result is that we can exclude non-trivial cosmetic contact…
The purpose of this expository article is to give a down-to-hearth introduction to the notion of an arithmetic group and arithmetic manifold. To achieve this we have decided to bring two geometrical questions relating the growth of systole…
More than two centuries ago Malfatti (see \cite{malfatti}) raised and solved the following problem (the so-called Malfatti's construction problem):Construct three circles into a triangle so that each of them touches the two others from…
The contact number of a packing of finitely many balls in Euclidean $d$-space is the number of touching pairs of balls in the packing. A prominent subfamily of sphere packings is formed by the so-called totally separable sphere packings:…
Following a combinatorial observation made by one of us recently in relation to a problem in quantum information [Nakata et al., Phys. Rev. X 7:021006 (2017)], we study what are the possible intersection cardinalities of a $k$-dimensional…
In 1955, Greenwood and Gleason showed that the Ramsey number R(3, 3, 3) = 17 by constructing an edge-chromatic graph on 16 vertices in three colors with no triangles. Their technique employed finite fields. This same result was obtained…
Let $X$ be an irreducible smooth geometrically integral projective surface over a field. In this paper we give an effective bound in terms of the Neron--Severi rank $\rho(X)$ of $X$ for the number of irreducible curves $C$ on $X$ with…
In the $k$-mismatch problem, given a pattern and a text of length $n$ and $m$ respectively, we have to find if the text has a sub-string with a Hamming distance of at most $k$ from the pattern. This has been studied in the classical setting…
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…
Two spheres with centers $p$ and $q$ and signed radii $r$ and $s$ are said to be in contact if $|p-q|^2 = (r-s)^2$. Using Lie's line-sphere correspondence, we show that if $F$ is a field in which $-1$ is not a square, then there is an…
The bisector of two nonempty sets P and Q in a metric space is the set of all points with equal distance to P and to Q. A distance k-sector of P and Q, where k is an integer, is a (k-1)-tuple (C_1, C_2, ..., C_{k-1}) such that C_i is the…
This note corrects the paper \cite{ex}, where lattice sequences having exponentially large kissing numbers were constructed. However it was noted in \cite{dif} that the arguments in that paper are not sufficient. Here we correct the…
In this paper we obtain new parametric ideal solutions of the Tarry-Escott problem of degrees 2, 3 and 5, that is, of the diophantine systems $\sum_{i=1}^{k+1}x_i^j=\sum_{i=1}^{k+1}y_i^j,\;j=1,\,2,\,\dots,\,k$, when $k$ is 2, 3 or 5. When…
In 1908, Voronoi introduced an algorithm that solves the lattice packing problem in any dimension in finite time. Voronoi showed that any lattice with optimal packing density must be a so-called perfect lattice, and his algorithm enumerates…
We consider a Hamiltonian describing three quantum particles in dimension one interacting through two-body short-range potentials. We prove that, as a suitable scale parameter in the potential terms goes to zero, such Hamiltonian converges…
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…
We derive lower estimates for the approximation of the $d$-dimensional Euclidean ball by polytopes with a fixed number of $k$-dimensional faces, $k\in\{0,1,\ldots,d-1\}$. The metrics considered include the intrinsic volume difference and…
Recently we gave arguments that only two unique topologically different configurations of 7 equal all mutually touching round cylinders (the configurations being mirror reflections of each other) are possible in 3D, although a whole world…