HANCOCK, N.H. — Anyone faced with the task of building a freestanding pile of spheres quickly discovers an obvious solution: Start by laying out the densest possible two-dimensional packing and then ...
In 1611 German mathematician Johannes Kepler made a conjecture about the densest way to stack oranges or other spheres with a minimum of space between them. It seemed nothing could beat the standard ...
This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Earlier this year, Maryna Viazovska showed ...
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