The dodecahedral conjecture in geometry is intimately related to sphere packing.
László Fejes Tóth, a 20th-century Hungarian geometer, considered the Voronoi decomposition of any given packing of unit spheres. He conjectured in 1943 that the minimal volume of any cell in the resulting Voronoi decomposition was at least as large as the volume of a regular dodecahedron circumscribed to a unit sphere. [1]
Thomas Callister Hales and Sean McLaughlin proved the conjecture in 1998, [2] following the same strategy that led Hales to his proof of the Kepler conjecture. The proofs rely on extensive computations. McLaughlin was awarded the 1999 Morgan Prize for his contribution to this proof.
In mathematics, Thurston's geometrization conjecture states that each of certain three-dimensional topological spaces has a unique geometric structure that can be associated with it. It is an analogue of the uniformization theorem for two-dimensional surfaces, which states that every simply connected Riemann surface can be given one of three geometries . In three dimensions, it is not always possible to assign a single geometry to a whole topological space. Instead, the geometrization conjecture states that every closed 3-manifold can be decomposed in a canonical way into pieces that each have one of eight types of geometric structure. The conjecture was proposed by William Thurston, and implies several other conjectures, such as the Poincaré conjecture and Thurston's elliptization conjecture.
The Kepler conjecture, named after the 17th-century mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, is a mathematical theorem about sphere packing in three-dimensional Euclidean space. It states that no arrangement of equally sized spheres filling space has a greater average density than that of the cubic close packing and hexagonal close packing arrangements. The density of these arrangements is around 74.05%.
In geometry, a sphere packing is an arrangement of non-overlapping spheres within a containing space. The spheres considered are usually all of identical size, and the space is usually three-dimensional Euclidean space. However, sphere packing problems can be generalised to consider unequal spheres, spaces of other dimensions or to non-Euclidean spaces such as hyperbolic space.
Discrete geometry and combinatorial geometry are branches of geometry that study combinatorial properties and constructive methods of discrete geometric objects. Most questions in discrete geometry involve finite or discrete sets of basic geometric objects, such as points, lines, planes, circles, spheres, polygons, and so forth. The subject focuses on the combinatorial properties of these objects, such as how they intersect one another, or how they may be arranged to cover a larger object.
In geometry, close-packing of equal spheres is a dense arrangement of congruent spheres in an infinite, regular arrangement. Carl Friedrich Gauss proved that the highest average density – that is, the greatest fraction of space occupied by spheres – that can be achieved by a lattice packing is
In mathematics, a 3-manifold is a topological space that locally looks like a three-dimensional Euclidean space. A 3-manifold can be thought of as a possible shape of the universe. Just as a sphere looks like a plane to a small and close enough observer, all 3-manifolds look like our universe does to a small enough observer. This is made more precise in the definition below.
In geometry, a rhombic enneacontahedron is a polyhedron composed of 90 rhombic faces; with three, five, or six rhombi meeting at each vertex. It has 60 broad rhombi and 30 slim. The rhombic enneacontahedron is a zonohedron with a superficial resemblance to the rhombic triacontahedron.
Hilbert's eighteenth problem is one of the 23 Hilbert problems set out in a celebrated list compiled in 1900 by mathematician David Hilbert. It asks three separate questions about lattices and sphere packing in Euclidean space.
Thomas Callister Hales is an American mathematician working in the areas of representation theory, discrete geometry, and formal verification. In representation theory he is known for his work on the Langlands program and the proof of the fundamental lemma over the group Sp(4). In discrete geometry, he settled the Kepler conjecture on the density of sphere packings and the honeycomb conjecture. In 2014, he announced the completion of the Flyspeck Project, which formally verified the correctness of his proof of the Kepler conjecture.
László Fejes Tóth was a Hungarian mathematician who specialized in geometry. He proved that a lattice pattern is the most efficient way to pack centrally symmetric convex sets on the Euclidean plane. He also investigated the sphere packing problem. He was the first to show, in 1953, that proof of the Kepler conjecture can be reduced to a finite case analysis and, later, that the problem might be solved using a computer.
In geometry, the trapezo-rhombic dodecahedron or rhombo-trapezoidal dodecahedron is a convex dodecahedron with 6 rhombic and 6 trapezoidal faces. It has D3h symmetry. A concave form can be constructed with an identical net, seen as excavating trigonal trapezohedra from the top and bottom. It is also called the trapezoidal dodecahedron.
The honeycomb conjecture states that a regular hexagonal grid or honeycomb has the least total perimeter of any subdivision of the plane into regions of equal area. The conjecture was proven in 1999 by mathematician Thomas C. Hales.
In geometry, a centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) is a special type of Voronoi tessellation in which the generating point of each Voronoi cell is also its centroid. It can be viewed as an optimal partition corresponding to an optimal distribution of generators. A number of algorithms can be used to generate centroidal Voronoi tessellations, including Lloyd's algorithm for K-means clustering or Quasi-Newton methods like BFGS.
In geometry, circle packing is the study of the arrangement of circles on a given surface such that no overlapping occurs and so that no circle can be enlarged without creating an overlap. The associated packing density, η, of an arrangement is the proportion of the surface covered by the circles. Generalisations can be made to higher dimensions – this is called sphere packing, which usually deals only with identical spheres.
The smoothed octagon is a region in the plane found by Karl Reinhardt in 1934 and conjectured by him to have the lowest maximum packing density of the plane of all centrally symmetric convex shapes. It was also independently discovered by Kurt Mahler in 1947. It is constructed by replacing the corners of a regular octagon with a section of a hyperbola that is tangent to the two sides adjacent to the corner and asymptotic to the sides adjacent to these.
Károly Bezdek is a Hungarian-Canadian mathematician. He is a professor as well as a Canada Research Chair of mathematics and the director of the Centre for Computational and Discrete Geometry at the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Also he is a professor of mathematics at the University of Pannonia in Veszprém, Hungary. His main research interests are in geometry in particular, in combinatorial, computational, convex, and discrete geometry. He has authored 3 books and more than 130 research papers. He is a founding Editor-in-Chief of the e-journal Contributions to Discrete Mathematics (CDM).
In computational geometry, a power diagram, also called a Laguerre–Voronoi diagram, Dirichlet cell complex, radical Voronoi tesselation or a sectional Dirichlet tesselation, is a partition of the Euclidean plane into polygonal cells defined from a set of circles. The cell for a given circle C consists of all the points for which the power distance to C is smaller than the power distance to the other circles. The power diagram is a form of generalized Voronoi diagram, and coincides with the Voronoi diagram of the circle centers in the case that all the circles have equal radii.
The Pursuit of Perfect Packing is a book on packing problems in geometry. It was written by physicists Tomaso Aste and Denis Weaire, and published in 2000 by Institute of Physics Publishing with a second edition published in 2008 by Taylor & Francis (ISBN 978-1-4200-6817-7).
In mathematics, the theory of finite sphere packing concerns the question of how a finite number of equally-sized spheres can be most efficiently packed. The question of packing finitely many spheres has only been investigated in detail in recent decades, with much of the groundwork being laid by László Fejes Tóth.