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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 ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
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.   &...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
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 ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
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_{\...
James Propp's user avatar
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