Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Packing it in

It is amazing and encouraging to me how there are still outstanding problems in science and mathematics that are so simple that statement of the problem can be understood by high school students. An example which has attracted a lot of interest in the past year is the problem of finding the optimum packing efficiency of tetrahedra.
There is a nice New York Times article and a Wolfram blog post about this.
By at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Statistical mechanics in just one equation

 This semester, I am giving four lectures in a third-year undergraduate course on statistical mechanics. Last year, I gave a guest lecture ...

  • Nobel Prize predictions for 2025
     This week Nobel Prizes will be announced. I have not done predictions since 2020 . This is a fun exercise. It is also good to reflect on w...
  • Ising model basics
    The Ising model is a paradigm in both statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics. Today for most theorists it is so familiar that so...
  • NF - mysteries of a small molecule
    Nitrogen fluoride (NF) seems like a very simple molecule and you would think it would very well understood, particularly as it is small enou...