Related papers: The Kepler conjecture
It has been known for almost 200 years that some angles cannot be trisected by straightedge and compass alone. This paper studies the set of such angles as well as its complement $\mathcal{T}$, both regarded as subsets of the unit circle…
The densest local packings of N identical nonoverlapping spheres within a radius Rmin(N) of a fixed central sphere of the same size are obtained using a nonlinear programming method operating in conjunction with a stochastic search of…
A significant fraction of Kepler systems are closely-packed, largely coplanar and circular. We study the stability of a 6-planet system, Kepler-11, to gain insights on the dynamics and formation history of such systems. Using a technique…
We give theorems that can be used to upper bound the densities of packings of different spherical caps in the unit sphere and of translates of different convex bodies in Euclidean space. These theorems extend the linear programming bounds…
Compact packings are specific packings of spheres which can be seen as tilings and are good candidates to maximize the density. We show that the compact packings of the Euclidean space with two sizes of spheres are exactly those obtained by…
We show there exists a packing of identical spheres in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with density at least \[ (1-o(1))\frac{d \log d}{2^{d+1}}\, , \] as $d\to\infty$. This improves upon previous bounds for general $d$ by a factor of order $\log d$ and is…
Packings of regular convex polygons ($n$-gons) that are sufficiently dense have been studied extensively in the context of modeling physical and biological systems as well as discrete and computational geometry. Former results were mainly…
An ellipsoid, the simplest non-spherical shape, has been extensively used as models for elongated building blocks for a wide spectrum of molecular, colloidal and granular systems. Yet the densest packing of congruent hard ellipsoids, which…
In 1993 Foisy et al. proved that the optimal Euclidean planar double bubble---the least-perimeter way to enclose and separate two given areas---is three circular arcs meeting at 120 degrees. We consider the plane with density $r^p$, joining…
Thurston's sphere packing on a 3-dimensional manifold is a generalization of Thusrton's circle packing on a surface, the rigidity of which has been open for many years. In this paper, we prove that Thurston's Euclidean sphere packing is…
We study some sequences of functions of one real variable and conjecture that they converge uniformly to functions with certain positivity and growth properties. Our conjectures imply a conjecture of Cohn and Elkies, which in turn implies…
Haag, Kertzer, Rickards, and Stange disprove the Local-Global Conjecture for Apollonian circle packings. We extend their disproof to four more types of integral circle packing: the octahedral, cubic, square, and triangular packings. In each…
The detour between two points u and v (on edges or vertices) of an embedded planar graph whose edges are curves is the ratio between the shortest path in in the graph between u and v and their Euclidean distance. The maximum detour over all…
The sphere packing problem asks for the densest packing of unit balls in d-dimensional Euclidean space. This problem has its roots in geometry, number theory and it is part of Hilbert's 18th problem. In 1958 C. A. Rogers proved a…
The congestion of a curve is a measure of how much it zigzags around locally. More precisely, a curve $\pi$ is $c$-packed if the length of the curve lying inside any ball is at most $c$ times the radius of the ball, and its congestion is…
For every convex disk $K$ (a convex compact subset of the plane, with non-void interior), the packing density $\delta(K)$ and covering density $\vartheta(K)$ form an ordered pair of real numbers, {\em i.e.}, a point in ${\mathbb R}^2$. The…
We define three-point bounds for sphere packing that refine the linear programming bound, and we compute these bounds numerically using semidefinite programming by choosing a truncation radius for the three-point function. As a result, we…
A quantum sl(2,R) coalgebra (with deformation parameter z) is shown to underly the construction of superintegrable Kepler potentials on 3D spaces of variable and constant curvature, that include the classical spherical, hyperbolic and…
We study the packing of a large number of congruent and non--overlapping circles inside a regular polygon. We have devised efficient algorithms that allow one to generate configurations of $N$ densely packed circles inside a regular polygon…
The topological structure resulting from the network of contacts between grains (\emph{contact network}) is studied for large samples of monosized spheres with densities (fraction of volume occupied by the spheres) ranging from 0.59 to…