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.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Emergence and protein folding

Proteins are a distinct state of matter. Globular proteins are tightly packed with a density comparable to a crystal but without the spatia...