The pursuit of perfect packing

Prefaces How Many Sweets in the Jar? Loose Change and Tight Packing A Teasing but Tractable Problem A Handful of Coins Order and Disorder Hard Problems with Hard Spheres The Greengrocer's Dilemma Ordered Close Packing-The Kepler Problem The Kepler Conjecture Marvelous Clarity, Neurotic Anxiety: The Life of Kepler Progress by Leaps and Bounds? Proof Positive? News from the Western Front The Programme of Thomas Hales At Last? Polishing Off the Programme The Acceptance of Proof The Flyspeck Project Who Cares? The Power of Thought Disordered Packings Balls in Bags A New Way of Looking How Many Balls in the Bag? Is the Bernal Close Packing Well Defined? Bernal's Long-Running Ball Game Tomography Takes Over Sands and Grains Granular Materials Osborne Reynolds: A Footprint in the Sand Major Bagnold's Desert Drive Dunes Order from Shaking Segregation Granular Temperature Divide and Conquer: Tiling Space Packing and Tiling The Voronoi Construction The Dual Construction of Delaunay Applications Vertices in Tilings Three Dimensions Regular and Semiregular Packings Peas and Pips Vegetable Staticks Stephen Hales Pomegranate Pips Biological Cells, Lead Shot, Rubber Balls, and Soap Bubbles: Plus ca Change Enthusiastic Admiration: The Honeycomb The Honeycomb Problem What the Bees Do Not Know A Search for Structure A Voice in the Wilderness The Two-Dimensional Soap Froth The Rules of the Game In a Cambridge Garden Toils and Troubles with Bubbles Playing with Bubbles A Blind Man in the Kingdom of the Sighted Proving Plateau Foam and Ether The Kelvin Cell Most Beautiful and Regular The Twinkling of an Eye Simulated Soap A Discovery in Dublin Crystals of Small Bubbles Bubbles in Beijing An Olympian Vision Fun and Fit for Purpose? A Flexible Friend? The Architecture of the World of Atoms Molecular Tactics Atoms and Molecules: Begging the Question Atoms as Points Playing Hardball Modern Crystallography Crystalline Packings Packing Tetrahedra Changed Utterly: Quasicrystals Amorphous Solids Crystal Nonsense Apollonius and Concrete Mixing Concrete Apollonian Packing Packing Fraction and Fractal Dimension Packing Fraction in Granular Aggregates Packings and Kisses in High Dimensions Packing in Many Dimensions A Kissing Competition Kissing the Neighbors in Higher Dimensions Will Disorder Win in the End? The Sweets in the Jar, the Pebbles on the Beach Those Sweets Hey, What Shape Do You Want Your Ice Cubes? Another Walk on the Beach The Giant's Causeway Worth Seeing? Idealization Oversteps Again The First Official Report Mallett's Model A Modern View The Last Word? Lost City? Finite Packings and Tessellations, from Soccer to Sausages The Challenge of a Finite Suitcase Soccer Balls Golf Balls Buckyballs Buckminster Fuller Graphenes The Thomson Problem Packing Points on a Disk The Tammes Problem Universal Optimal Configurations Helical Packings Virus Architecture Stuffing Sausages Filling Boxes The Malfatti Problem Odds and Ends Ordered Loose Packings Parking Cars Goldberg Variations Packing Regular Pentagons Dodecahedral Packing and Curved Spaces Microspheres and Opals Protein Folding The Tetra Pak Story Packing Regular Tetrahedra Nature and Geometry Appendix A: The Best Packing in Two Dimensions Appendix B: Turning Down the Heat: Simulated Annealing Index