Mathematicians Discover New Way for Spheres to ‘Kiss’
A new proof marks the first progress in decades on important cases of the so-called kissing problem. Getting there meant doing away with traditional approaches. The post Mathematicians Discover New Way for Spheres to ‘Kiss’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine
In May of 1694, in a lecture hall at the University of Cambridge, Isaac Newton and the astronomer David Gregory started to contemplate the nature of the stars, only to end up with a math puzzle that would persist for centuries. The details of their conversation were poorly recorded and are possibly apocryphal — it had something to do with how stars of varying sizes would orbit a central sun.
