Abstract
The first three chapters describe some of the questions that motivated this book. In this chapter we discuss the problems of packing spheres in Euclidean space and of packing points on the surface of a sphere. The kissing number problem is an important special case of the latter, and asks how many spheres can just touch another sphere of the same size. We summarize what is known about these topics and also introduce terminology that will be used throughout the book.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Conway, J.H., Sloane, N.J.A. (1999). Sphere Packings and Kissing Numbers. In: Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups. Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften, vol 290. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-6568-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-6568-7_1
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-3134-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-6568-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive