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

Jan 15, 2025 - 17:26
Mathematicians Discover New Way for Spheres to ‘Kiss’

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.

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