Questions tagged [sphere-packing]

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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 $\mathbb R^3$ ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
14 votes
0 answers
2k views

How many unit balls can be put into a unit cube?

Here a unit ball is a ball of diameter 1, and a unit cube is a cube of edge length 1. A famous counterintuitive fact is that, as the dimension increases, the volume of the unit ball tends to zero ...
11 votes
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Electrons on a pancake ellipsoid

The problems of minimizing the potential energy of electrons on a sphere, or maximizing the smallest distance between the electrons, have been well-studied. E.g., see the earlier MO question "...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
10 votes
0 answers
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Kissing the Monster, or $196,560$ vs. $196,883$

The $D = 24$ kissing number is $196,560$, and the dimension of the smallest non-trivial complex representation of the Monster group is $196,883$. These two numbers are nearly but not quite equal, and ...
Harry Wilson's user avatar
6 votes
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119 views

Aperiodic packings of the plane with disks of multiple radii

Does there exist a finite set of radii such that some aperiodic packing of the plane by disks of those radii is believed to achieve the maximal packing density (not achieved by any periodic packing)? ...
James Propp's user avatar
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6 votes
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Packing points in a lattice

Let $L$ be the square or triangular lattice in the plane, with nearest neighbors having distance 1. Has anyone studied the problem of finding the maximum (okay, supremum) density achieved by a subset ...
James Propp's user avatar
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6 votes
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226 views

Positive-definite lattice with O(n,n) Gram matrix generated by minimal vectors

Consider a positive-definite $2n$-dimensional lattice with minimum norm $\mu$. It is sometimes possible to find a generating set of minimal vectors for the lattice such that the Gram matrix takes the ...
Chaitanya Murthy's user avatar
5 votes
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118 views

Sphere packing and modular forms in known dimensions (maybe 2)

Viazovska constructed magic functions via integral transforms of (quasi-)modular forms that gives a tight bound for linear programming bounds in 8 and 24 dimensions (with other mathematicians after ...
Seewoo Lee's user avatar
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131 views

Packing cylinders in a sphere: Phase transition?

Let $S$ be a unit-radius sphere in $\mathbb{R}^3$, and $c$ a cylinder of length $L$ and radius $\epsilon$. It appears to me that for $L \in [\sqrt{2},2]$ and small $\epsilon$, the optimal packing of ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
5 votes
0 answers
935 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 ...
Rob Bird's user avatar
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Does this code have a name?

Hamming-distance-4 binary codes have a very direct relationship to sphere packings. That's because we can identify the codewords with the cosets of $\mathbb{Z}^n/(2\mathbb{Z})^n$, and Hamming-distance-...
Veit Elser's user avatar
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Do kissing numbers with distance $d$ always grow polynomially or exponentially in dimension?

Let $A_d(n)$ be the largest number of points that can be packed on the $n$-unit sphere, such that every point is at least $d$ apart. Compare with, for instance, https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03631 When ...
Alex Meiburg's user avatar
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3 votes
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45 views

Bound on local packing density of 2D Delaunay cell

What is the history of the result that in a packing of the plane by unit disks, no Delaunay cell can be occupied by disk-sectors whose total measure exceeds $\pi/\sqrt{12}$ times the area of the cell? ...
James Propp's user avatar
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3 votes
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Computing the Volume of Closed 3-Manifolds and the Geometrization Conjecture

My question is whether or not if I generalize Theorem 2(i) of "Contact Graphs of Unit Sphere Packings Revisited" [2012] by K. Bezdek and S. Reid (arXiv link) which states The number of touching ...
Samuel Reid's user avatar
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2 votes
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90 views

Can Chang and Wang's proof of Thue’s Theorem on circular packing be extended into other dimentions?

The simplicity of Chang and Wang's proof of Thue’s Theorem (link on arxiv) on circular packing took me by surprise. Have similar ideas been found helpful in other dimensions? For example, partition ...
Ye Tian's user avatar
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136 views

density of lattices

I'm looking for references pertaining to the remark at the bottom of p.18 of Conway-Sloane, "Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups" (3rd ed), henceforth referred to as "SPLG". First,...
W Sao's user avatar
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Simplicial density function simultaneously defined for hyperbolic and spherical space (Kellerhals, 1998)

I am confused about the proof of Corollary 4.2 in "Ball Packings in Spaces of Constant Curvature and the Simplicial Density Function". The point of confusion is equation 4.3, where Kellerhals states ...
Chris Jones's user avatar
2 votes
0 answers
159 views

Packing net of simplex

For given $d$, we can define the simplex as follows, $S=\{(x_1,x_2,\cdots,x_d):x_1\geq x_2\geq \cdots\geq x_d\geq 0,\sum x_i=1\}$. We can define the distance on $S$ as $L_1$ distance. An $\epsilon$ ...
gondolf's user avatar
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2 votes
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452 views

Finding good high-dimensional sphere coverings in Euclidean space

Suppose we want to cover the unit sphere $\mathcal{S}^{d-1} := \{\mathbf{x} \in \mathbb{R}^d: \|\mathbf{x}\|_2 = 1\}$ with spherical caps $\mathcal{C}_{\mathbf{y}} := \{\mathbf{x} \in \mathcal{S}^{d-1}...
TMM's user avatar
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Is the kissing number in $n$ dimensions always divisible by $n$? And what is the base of exponential growth of the kissing number?

And why are the kissing numbers for 1, 2, 3, 4 and 8 dimensions all highly composite numbers?
user50746's user avatar
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263 views

Sphere packings with antipodal (unequal) spheres

Let $\|\cdot\|_2$ denote the Euclidean norm, let $\langle \cdot, \cdot\rangle$ denote the standard dot product, and let $\mathcal{S}^{d-1} = \{\mathbf{x} \in \mathbb{R}^d: \|\mathbf{x}\|_2 = 1\}$ ...
TMM's user avatar
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1 vote
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69 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 $D \subseteq \mathbb{R}^m$. ...
Ankur's user avatar
  • 183
1 vote
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302 views

Which term is better for the so called "sphere packing"?

I'm working on sphere packings. When I write, I'm confused with basic definitions. I'm hesitating between the terms "sphere", "ball" or "oriented sphere". For example, on the wikipedia page of circle ...
Hao Chen's user avatar
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1 vote
0 answers
577 views

maximal minimum distance in a sphere packing

Hi everyone. I need to pick a set of 65 points p(x,y,z) in a 3D space of 274625 points; as the set picked should provide the maximum possible minimum Hamming distance. (Consider the Hamming bound for ...
Tan's user avatar
  • 11
0 votes
0 answers
71 views

packing numbers of the unit balls in Euclidean spaces and the dimensions

Let $k$, $m$ and $n$ be positive integers. Let $r$ be a positive real number. The $n$-th ordered $r$-disk configuration space on the Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^{mk}$ is $$ F_r(\mathbb{R}^{mk},...
Shiquan Ren's user avatar
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