Kepler's Conjecture/Historical Note
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Historical Note on Kepler's Conjecture
This result was conjectured by Johannes Kepler in $1611$.
While it is in a certain sense obvious that the most efficient technique for packing spheres is the one traditionally used by greengrocer's to stack orange's, it proved challenging to actually prove it.
- Many mathematicians believe, and all physicists know, that the density cannot exceed $\dfrac \pi {\sqrt {18} }$.
The proof by Thomas Callister Hales was finally declared complete and correct in $2014$, at the climax of a project spanning some $20$ years.
Sources
- 1947: C.A. Rogers: Existence Theorems in the Geometry of Numbers (Ann. Math. Ser. 2 Vol. 48: pp. 994 – 1002) www.jstor.org/stable/1969390
- 1986: David Wells: Curious and Interesting Numbers ... (previous) ... (next): $0 \cdotp 7404 \ldots$
- 1997: David Wells: Curious and Interesting Numbers (2nd ed.) ... (previous) ... (next): $0 \cdotp 7404 \ldots$
- 2008: David Nelson: The Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics (4th ed.) ... (previous) ... (next): Kepler's conjecture (J. Kepler, 1611)
- Weisstein, Eric W. "Kepler Conjecture." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/KeplerConjecture.html