Dimensions
156 x 238 x 25mm
How some of the greatest minds in history helped solve one of the oldest math problems in the world.
In 1611, Johannes Kepler proposed that the best way to pack spheres as densely as possible was to pile them up in the same way that grocers stack oranges and tomatoes. This proposition, known as Kepler's Conjecture, seemed obvious to everyone except mathematicians, who seldom take anyone's word for anything.
In the tradition of 'Fermat's Enigma', George Szpiro shows how the problem engaged and stymied many men of genius over the centuries - Sir Walter Raleigh, astronomer Tycho Brahe, Sir Isaac Newton, mathematicians CF Gauss and David Hilbert, and R Buckminster Fuller, to name a few - until Thomas Hales of the University of Michigan submitted what seems to be a definite proof in 1998.
