All Questions
17 questions
35
votes
3
answers
2k
views
The kissing number of a square, cube, hypercube?
How many nonoverlapping unit squares can (nonoverlappingly) touch one unit square?
By "nonoverlapping" I mean: not sharing an interior point.
By "touch" I mean: sharing a boundary point.
&...
- 151k
34
votes
6
answers
8k
views
Covering a unit ball with balls half the radius
This is a direct (and obvious) generalization of the recent MO question, "Covering disks with smaller disks":
How many balls of radius $\frac{1}{2}$ are needed to cover completely a ball of ...
- 151k
26
votes
0
answers
359
views
Can 4-space be partitioned into Klein bottles?
It is known that $\mathbb{R}^3$ can be partitioned into disjoint circles,
or into disjoint unit circles, or into congruent copies of a real-analytic curve
(Is it possible to partition $\mathbb R^3$ ...
- 151k
16
votes
4
answers
3k
views
covering by spherical caps
Consider the unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^d.$ Pick now some $\alpha$ (I am thinking of $\alpha \ll 1,$ but I don't know how germane this is). The question is: how many spherical caps of angular radius $\...
- 96.4k
16
votes
1
answer
538
views
Balls in Hilbert space
I recently noticed an interesting fact which leads to a perhaps difficult question. If $n$ is a natural number, let $k_n$ be the smallest number $k$ such that an open ball of radius $k$ in a real ...
- 2,049
14
votes
2
answers
533
views
Double kissing problem
Consider two touching unit balls which will be called central balls. What is the maximum number $k$ of non-overlapping unit balls so that each ball touches as least one of two central balls?
An easy ...
- 141
13
votes
2
answers
1k
views
Average degree of contact graph for balls in a box
Imagine you dump congruent, hard, frictionless balls in a box,
letting gravity compress the balls into a stable configuration
(I believe such configurations are called
jammed.)
Assume the box ...
- 151k
6
votes
1
answer
409
views
Sphere packing processes during biological development
Within the context of mathematical biology, a sphere packing problem occurred to me. I must note that unlike the typical sphere packing problems, the variant I consider involves minimising the average ...
- 3,871
6
votes
1
answer
205
views
Hiding $k$ disks inside a larger disk
Suppose one has $k$ unit-radius disks, and the goal is to hide them inside
a disk of radius $R \gg k$.
The detection probes are rays along a line.
(Think of the disks as tumor cells, and the rays as ...
- 151k
5
votes
0
answers
1k
views
N-balls covering n-balls
This question is a follow-on question from:
Covering a unit ball with balls half the radius
The questions are these:
Given an arbitrary dimension d, and a unit n-ball in d-dimensional Euclidean ...
- 151
4
votes
1
answer
323
views
Blowing up spheres in a face centered cubic (fcc) packing geometry just enough to cover the volume of the lattice
Imagine I have an infinite lattice of spheres packed in a face centered cubic (fcc) lattice geometry which has the basis: $((-1, -1, 0), (1, -1, 0), (0, 1, -1))$. Here, provided that sphere-sphere ...
- 41
3
votes
2
answers
831
views
Kepler conjecture: Are there only two most efficient packings or could there be more than two?
Today I attended a talk by Terence Tao, attended by (I'm guessing) probably at least a couple of thousand people, in which among other things he said it had been proved that no packing of spheres in ...
3
votes
1
answer
118
views
Question arise from kissing number in 2 dimension
I'm considering an extended problem of kissing number in $\mathbb{R}^2$.
Suppose I have a given disc $\mathcal{D}$ of radius 1/2 and infinitely many discs all of radius 1/2 and all these discs and ...
- 1,495
3
votes
1
answer
197
views
Three-dimensional Apollonian spirals
Given mutually (externally) tangent spheres $S_1$, $S_2$, $S_3$, $S_4$, let $S_n$ be the unique sphere externally tangent to $S_{n-1}$, $S_{n-2}$, $S_{n-3}$, and $S_{n-4}$ for $n \geq 5$.
Let $P_{\...
- 19.7k
1
vote
1
answer
524
views
How to compute the number of regular spheres needed to fill a rectangular space
Computing the volume of a sphere is straightforward 4/3*pi*R^3
As is the volume of a rectangular space length*width*height (e.g. 10*10*6)
How might I go about determining how many spheres would fit ...
- 111
1
vote
0
answers
70
views
Covering number of the range of a function
I have come across the need to know a bound on a certain curious quantity: the covering number of the range of a continuous function $f: D \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^n$, where $D \subseteq \mathbb{R}^m$. ...
- 183
0
votes
1
answer
214
views
Generalized Sphere Kissing Problem [duplicate]
I am currently researching discrete geometry and I am in need of an upper bound on a generalized kissing number in 3-dimensions dependent upon a parameter $\eta$ which is the radii of spheres touching ...
- 1,441