Related papers: The one-sided kissing number in four dimensions
In 1694, Gregory and Newton discussed the problem to determine the kissing number of a rigid material ball. This problem and its higher dimensional generalization have been studied by many mathematicians, including Minkowski, van der…
The aim of this paper is to highlight recent progress in using conic optimization methods to study geometric packing problems. We will look at four geometric packing problems of different kinds: two on the unit sphere -- the kissing number…
The best previous lower bounds for kissing numbers in dimensions 25 through 31 were constructed using a set $S$ with $|S| = 480$ of minimal vectors of the Leech Lattice, $\Lambda_{24}$, such that $\langle x, y \rangle \leq 1$ for any…
We analyze Sz\"oll\H{o}si's recent construction of a conjecturally optimal five-dimensional kissing configuration and produce a new such configuration, the fourth to be discovered. We construct five-dimensional sphere packings from these…
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…
We prove a sharp upper bound on the number of shortest cycles contained inside any connected graph in terms of its number of vertices, girth, and maximal degree. Equality holds only for Moore graphs, which gives a new characterization of…
In this note, we give a short solution of the kissing number problem in dimension three.
We show that the maximum number of unit distances or of diameters in a set of n points in d-dimensional Euclidean space is attained only by specific types of Lenz constructions, for all d >= 4 and n sufficiently large, depending on d. As a…
A family of spherical caps of the 2-dimensional unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^2$ is called a totally separable packing in short, a TS-packing if any two spherical caps can be separated by a great circle which is disjoint from the interior of each…
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…
It is shown that the smallest possible distance between two disjoint lattice polytopes contained in the cube $[0,k]^3$ is exactly $$ \frac{1}{\sqrt{2(2k^2-4k+5)(2k^2-2k+1)}} $$ for every integer $k$ at least $4$. The proof relies on…
A kissing sphere is a sphere that is tangent to a fixed reference ball. We develop in this paper a distance geometry for kissing spheres, which turns out to be a generalization of the classical Euclidean distance geometry.
A homothetic packing of squares is any set of various-size squares with the same orientation where no two squares have overlapping interiors. If all $n$ squares have the same size then we can have up to roughly $4n$ contacts by arranging…
In 1694, Gregory and Newton proposed the problem to determine the kissing number of a rigid material ball. This problem and its higher dimensional generalization have been studied by many mathematicians, including Minkowski, van der…
We consider how flat a lattice simplex contained in the hypercube $[0,k]^d$ can be. This question is related to the notion of kissing polytopes: two lattice polytopes contained in the hypercube $[0,k]^d$ are kissing when they are disjoint…
The Borsuk number $b(n)$ of $n$-dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^n$ is the smallest integer such that any set $F \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ of unit diameter can be partitioned into $b(n)$ subsets of strictly smaller diameter. For $n=4$,…
By taking the complements of embeddings of sphere plumbings in connected sums of $\mathbb{C} P^2$, we construct examples of simply connected four-manifolds with lens space boundary and $b_2 = 1$. The resulting boundaries include many lens…
In discrete geometry, the contact number of a given finite number of non-overlapping spheres was introduced as a generalization of Newton's kissing number. This notion has not only led to interesting mathematics, but has also found…
We prove an upper bound for the number of shortest closed geodesics in a closed hyperbolic manifold of any dimension in terms of its volume and systole, generalizing a theorem of Parlier for surfaces. We also obtain bounds on the number of…
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…