Science News, May 19th, 1990
Curves for a Tighter Fit
Consider the problem of filling a large shipping carton with identical ball bearings. Spheres don't fit together as neatly as, say, cubes. No matter how cleverly you arrange the balls, about one-quarter of the space in the carton -- or in any other container tightly packed with identical balls -- will remain unoccupied.
But is there a best way of packing identical spheres in a space so as to fill the maximum possible volume? That question remains a famous and unsolved problem in mathematics. No mathematician has yet succeeded in proving that a particular way of sta...
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