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 ...

Sphere packing and crystallization involve the study of how identical particles arrange themselves in space under pairwise interactions, with sphere packing focusing on the densest arrangement of ...

In a pair of papers posted online this month, a Ukrainian mathematician has solved two high-dimensional versions of the centuries-old “sphere packing” problem. In dimensions eight and 24 (the latter ...

Theoretical physicist Moumita Maiti and colleagues at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, India, have now implemented an algorithm for analysing void space in ...

In 1611 German mathematician Johannes Kepler made a conjecture about the densest way to stack oranges or other spheres with a minimum of space between them. It seemed nothing could beat the standard ...

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 ...

High-dimensional spheres can have a much wider variety of structures than mathematicians thought possible. If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic on a rainy afternoon, you’ve probably watched raindrops ...

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 ...