For centuries, physicists and mathematicians have been trying to work out the most efficient way of packing spheres in order to minimize wasted space. They think they know how to maximise efficiency ...

Imagine placing oranges or tennis balls into a rigid container. How can the balls be arranged such that they occupy the largest volume fraction of the container, otherwise known as the largest packing ...

A NUMERICAL approach using a digital computer has been used to construct a simple model of the unit cell in a randomly packed bed of identical hard spheres. The cell is built up by introducing spheres ...

Researchers at Chinese Academy of Science and Osaka University show that, unlike the crystalline close packing of spheres, random close packing or jamming of spheres in a container can take place in a ...