How bees, beer cans and big data all solve the same problem: not enough space. By Steven Strogatz Photo illustrations by Jens Mortensen Each installment of “Math, Revealed” starts with an object, ...

Have you ever wondered about the best way to pack a finite number of identical spheres into a shape-shifting flexible container, like a convex hull? An intuitively simple problem concerning the best ...

Sphere packing and crystallization involve the study of how identical particles arrange themselves in space under pairwise interactions, with sphere packing focusing on the densest arrangement of ...

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 ...

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 ...

This improvisational approach nonetheless pays dividends. In recent months AI models have proved capable of solving ...

This news release is available in German. Explaining the complex structure of tropical forests is one of the great challenges in ecology. An issue of special interest is the distribution of different ...