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Gift Wrapping Five Oranges Has Outwitted the Best Minds in Mathematics for Generations (www.scientificamerican.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Interesting problem

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[–] [email protected] 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!