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 ...

They may not know it, but grocers face some of the most difficult questions in mathematics when stacking produce each day. Four centuries ago, the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler guessed ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...