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 ...

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 ...

We propose a new class of space-filling designs called rotated sphere packing designs for computer experiments. The approach starts from the asymptotically optimal positioning of identical balls that ...

Winter means tangerines. The joy of sitting in a warm room and peeling tangerines until your fingers turn yellow is a luxury that can only be savored in winter. As I was eating tangerines, I looked at ...

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 ...