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 ...

Mathematical modelling and optimisation in packing problems constitute a critical research area that combines advanced algorithms, rigorous analytical formulations, and practical applications. This ...

Imagine placing oranges or tennis balls into a rigid container. How can the balls be arranged such that they occupy the largest volume fraction of the container, otherwise known as the largest packing ...

As an undergraduate at the University of Chile, Bernardo Subercaseaux took a dim view of using computers to do math. It seemed antithetical to real intellectual discovery. “There’s some instinct or ...

It’s a tight squeeze. Mathematicians have proved that they know the best way to pack spheres in 8 and 24 dimensions – the first time this problem has been solved in a new dimension in almost 20 years.

From the outside looking in, a fall semester Operations Research class looked just like any other—math and science students gazing intently into the faces of their computers, quietly puzzling over how ...

They had to throw away most of what it produced but there was gold among the garbage. Google DeepMind has used a large language model to crack a famous unsolved problem in pure mathematics. In a paper ...