English

Packing $1.35\cdot 10^{11}$ rectangles into a unit square

Combinatorics 2022-11-21 v1 Metric Geometry Optimization and Control

Abstract

It is known that i=11i(i+1)=1\sum\limits_{i=1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{i (i+1)} = 1. In 1968, Meir and Moser asked for finding the smallest ϵ\epsilon such that all the rectangles of sizes 1/i×1/(i+1)1/i \times 1/(i + 1) for i=1,2,i = 1, 2, \ldots, can be packed into a unit square or a rectangle of area 1+ϵ1 + \epsilon. In this paper, we show that we can pack the first 1.3510111.35\cdot10^{11} rectangles into the unit square and give an estimate for ϵ\epsilon from this packing.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.10356,
  title  = {Packing $1.35\cdot 10^{11}$ rectangles into a unit square},
  author = {Mingliang Zhu and Antal Joós},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.10356},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

7 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T06:13:49.916Z