this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
19 points (100.0% liked)

Science

12955 readers
137 users here now

Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
alyaza@beehaw.org
Gaywallet@beehaw.org
remington@beehaw.org
19
Gift Wrapping Five Oranges Has Outwitted the Best Minds in Mathematics for Generations (www.scientificamerican.com)
submitted 1 year ago by saint@group.lt to c/science@beehaw.org
5 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Interesting problem

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] realChem@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, arbitrary sphere packing problems turn out to be quite tricky. Thankfully there are some nice simple cases that actually have physical relevance, like 3D packing of infinite regular spheres (FCC/HCP packings win). Edit: actually proving that isn't exactly easy, but the fact that that's the densest packing of atoms we observe in nature was a good hint!

But when you try to generalize things in some way... Well, the article does a pretty good job explaining why it gets hard!