On packing spheres into containers (about Kepler's finite sphere packing problem)

In an Euclidean $d$-space, the container problem asks to pack $n$ equally sized spheres into a minimal dilate of a fixed container. If the container is a smooth convex body and $d\geq 2$ we show that solutions to the container problem can not have a ``simple structure'' for large $n$. By this we in particular find that there exist arbitrary small $r>0$, such that packings in a smooth, 3-dimensional convex body, with a maximum number of spheres of radius $r$, are necessarily not hexagonal close packings. This contradicts Kepler's famous statement that the cubic or hexagonal close packing ``will be the tightest possible, so that in no other arrangement more spheres could be packed into the same container''.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures; v2: major revision, extended result, simplified and clarified proo

Sphere packings revisited

AbstractIn this paper we survey most of the recent and often surprising results on packings of congruent spheres in d-dimensional spaces of constant curvature. The topics discussed are as follows:–Hadwiger numbers of convex bodies and kissing numbers of spheres;–touching numbers of convex bodies;–Newton numbers of convex bodies;–one-sided Hadwiger and kissing numbers;–contact graphs of finite packings and the combinatorial Kepler problem;–isoperimetric problems for Voronoi cells, the strong dodecahedral conjecture and the truncated octahedral conjecture;–the strong Kepler conjecture;–bounds on the density of sphere packings in higher dimensions;–solidity and uniform stability.Each topic is discussed in details along with some of the “most wanted” research problems

When Ternary Triangulated Disc Packings Are Densest: Examples, Counter-Examples and Techniques

We consider ternary disc packings of the plane, i.e. the packings using discs of three different radii. Packings in which each "hole" is bounded by three pairwise tangent discs are called triangulated. Connelly conjectured that when such packings exist, one of them maximizes the proportion of the covered surface: this holds for unary and binary disc packings. For ternary packings, there are 164 pairs (r, s), 1 > r > s, allowing triangulated packings by discs of radii 1, r and s. In this paper, we enhance existing methods of dealing with maximal-density packings in order to study ternary triangulated packings. We prove that the conjecture holds for 31 triplets of disc radii and disprove it for 40 other triplets. Finally, we classify the remaining cases where our methods are not applicable. Our approach is based on the ideas present in the Hales\u27 proof of the Kepler conjecture. Notably, our proof features local density redistribution based on computer search and interval arithmetic