Related papers: The Kepler conjecture
We have studied the packing of congruent disks on a spherical cap, for caps of different size and number of disks, $N$. This problem has been considered before only in the limit cases of circle packing inside a circle and on a sphere…
In \cite{Sz17-2} we considered hyperball packings in $3$-dimensional hyperbolic space. We developed a decomposition algorithm that for each saturated hyperball packing provides a decomposition of $\HYP$ into truncated tetrahedra. In order…
Packings of equal disks in the plane are known to have density at most $\pi/\sqrt{12}$, although this density is never achieved in the square torus, which is what we call the plane modulo the square lattice. We find packings of disks in a…
Given a sphere of any radius $r$ in an $n$-dimensional Euclidean space, we study the coverings of this sphere with solid spheres of radius one. Our goal is to design a covering of the lowest covering density, which defines the average…
This work investigates dense packings of congruent hard infinitesimally--thin circular arcs in the two-dimensional Euclidean space. It focuses on those denotable as major whose subtended angle $\theta \in \left ( \pi, 2\pi \right ]$.…
We study the optimal packing of hard spheres in an infinitely long cylinder, using simulated annealing, and compare our results with the analogous problem of packing disks on the unrolled surface of a cylinder. The densest structures are…
The densest local packings of N three-dimensional identical nonoverlapping spheres within a radius Rmin(N) of a fixed central sphere of the same size are obtained for selected values of N up to N = 1054. In the predecessor to this paper…
We present a method for discovering dense packings of general convex hard particles and apply it to study the dense packing behavior of a one-parameter family of particles with tetrahedral symmetry representing a deformation of the ideal…
In this paper we prove a theorem that provides an upper bound for the density of packings of congruent copies of a given convex body in $\mathbb{R}^n$; this theorem is a generalization of the linear programming bound for sphere packings. We…
Based on results from the physics and mathematics literature which suggest a series of clearly defined conjectures, we formulate three simple scenarios for the fate of hard sphere crystallization in high dimension: (A) crystallization is…
The packing density of the regular cross-polytope in Euclidean $n$-space is unknown except in dimensions $2$ and $4$ where it is 1. The only non-trivial upper bound is due to Gravel, Elser, and Kallus (2011) who proved that for $n=3$ the…
Obtaining general relations between macroscopic properties of random assemblies, such as density, and the microscopic properties of their constituent particles, such as shape, is a foundational challenge in the study of amorphous materials.…
In \cite{Sz17-2} we proved that to each saturated congruent hyperball packing exists a decomposition of $3$-dimensional hyperbolic space $\mathbb{H}^3$ into truncated tetrahedra. Therefore, in order to get a density upper bound for…
In 1974, Witsenhausen asked for the maximum possible density $\alpha_n$ of a measurable subset $A$ of the unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^{n-1}\subset \mathbb{R}^n$ such that $A$ contains no pair of orthogonal vectors. For $n=3$, the best known…
In this paper we generalize the classical theorem of Thue about the optimal circular disc packing in the plane. We are given a family of circular discs, not necessarily of equal radii, with the property that the inflation of every disc by a…
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…
The problem of packing a system of particles as densely as possible is foundational in the field of discrete geometry and is a powerful model in the material and biological sciences. As packing problems retreat from the reach of solution by…
The present work surveys problems in $n$-dimensional space with $n$ large. Early development in the study of packing and covering in high dimensions was motivated by the geometry of numbers. Subsequent results, such as the discovery of the…
We study density estimation in Kullback-Leibler divergence: given an i.i.d. sample from an unknown density $p^\star$, the goal is to construct an estimator $\widehat{p}$ such that $\mathrm{KL}(p^\star,\widehat{p})$ is small with high…
In an old paper of the author the thinnest five-neighbour packing of translates of a convex disc (different from a parallelogram) was determined. The minimal density was $3/7$, and was attained for a certain packing of triangles. In that…