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 ...

In math, the search for optimal patterns never ends. The sphere-packing problem — which asks how to cram balls into a (high-dimensional) box as efficiently as possible — is no exception. It has ...

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 ...