HANCOCK, N.H. — Anyone faced with the task of building a freestanding pile of spheres quickly discovers an obvious solution: Start by laying out the densest possible two-dimensional packing and then ...

Winter means tangerines. The joy of sitting in a warm room and peeling tangerines until your fingers turn yellow is a luxury that can only be savored in winter. As I was eating tangerines, I looked at ...

How to safely reopen offices, schools and other public spaces while keeping people six feet apart comes down to a question mathematicians have been studying for centuries. Sphere packing might seem ...

Circle packing encapsulates the challenge of optimally arranging a set of circles within a given container without overlap, a process that has profound implications in both theoretical mathematics and ...