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 ...

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 ...

A NUMERICAL approach using a digital computer has been used to construct a simple model of the unit cell in a randomly packed bed of identical hard spheres. The cell is built up by introducing spheres ...