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 ...

Explaining the complex structure of tropical forests is one of the great challenges in ecology. An issue of special interest is the distribution of different sizes of trees, something which is of ...

In 1611 German mathematician Johannes Kepler made a conjecture about the densest way to stack oranges or other spheres with a minimum of space between them. It seemed nothing could beat the standard ...

How bees, beer cans and big data all solve the same problem: not enough space. By Steven Strogatz Photo illustrations by Jens Mortensen Each installment of “Math, Revealed” starts with an object, ...

Higher dimensional spheres, or hyperspheres, are counter-intuitive and almost impossible to visualize. Mathematician Kelsey Houston-Edwards explains higher dimensional spheres and how recent ...

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 ...

Although the concept of random close packing with an almost universal packing fraction of approximately 0.64 for hard spheres was introduced more than half a century ago, there are still ongoing ...

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 news release is available in German. Explaining the complex structure of tropical forests is one of the great challenges in ecology. An issue of special interest is the distribution of different ...