A Brief History of the Sphere Packing Problem
Author: Eli LeChien
Sir Walter Raleigh was a famous British explorer, although some consider him to be more akin to a pirate. He asked one of his assistants, mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriet, what the most effective way to stack cannonballs is to minimize the space used for their storage on his ships. Thomas Harriet was an atomist, and so to him the solution to this question had much deeper ramifications than saving Sir Raleigh’s ship space; it could unlock the secrets of the universe itself. Through his interest in astronomy, Harriet was good friends with famous astronomer Johannes Kepler, with whom he spoke about the problem. In 1611, Kepler wrote in his book The Six-Cornered Snowflake that the ideal packing is the face centered cubic, with a packing density of around 74%. Despite the work that Harriet did on the problem, the face-centered cubic being the most dense packing became known as the Kepler Conjecture (Darling).
