How to safely reopen offices, schools and other public spaces while keeping people six feet apart comes down to a question mathematicians have been studying for centuries. Sphere packing might seem ...

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 ...

Everybody who has tried to stack oranges in a box knows that a regular packing of spheres in a flat layer naturally leads to a hexagonal pattern, where each sphere is surrounded by six neighbours in a ...

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 ...

Improvements in how densely spheres and other shapes can be packed together could lead to advances in materials science, deep space communication and theoretical physics. In the lead-up to the launch ...

A NUMERICAL approach using a digital computer has been used to construct a simple model of the unit cell in a randomly packed bed of identical hard spheres. The cell is built up by introducing spheres ...

Packing hard spheres has long been a problem that has interested the physics and engineering community. How tightly one can cram simple spheres into a volume is a problem that was formally posed by ...