Originating author is Christiane Rousseau.
What is the densest packing of spheres? Kepler conjectured that it was the one you observe with oranges at the fruit shop, and which is called the face-centered cubic lattice (Figure 1). At the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900, David Hilbert gave a very famous lecture in which he stated 23 problems that would have deep significance for the advance of mathematical science in the 20-th century. The problem of the densest packing of spheres, also called Kepler’s conjecture, is part of Hilbert’s 18-th problem. Kepler’s conjecture was only proved in 1998 by Thomas Hales, and the details of the proof were published in 2006.
Receive notice of every new vignette.
Search
Meta