Sphere packings and generative

ABSTRACT

In 1998, the oldest problem in discrete geometry, the 400-year old Kep ler conjecture, was solved. The conjecture asserts that the familiar cannonball packing of balls achieves the greatest density of any possible packing. The proof of the conjecture was unusually long, requiring nearly 300 pages of careful reasoning, 3 gigabytes of stored data, and 40,000 lines of specialized computer code. The computer verifications required for the proof were carried out over a period of years.This lecture will propose a new, vastly simplified, intuitive solution of the Kepler conjecture based on ideas from the field of generative programming.

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Primary Classification:
  A. General Literature

General Terms:
Documentation