PUBLIC LECTURE: How to stack oranges in three dimensions, 24 dimensions, and beyond

A free public lecture by by Akshay Venkatesh, Professor of Mathematics, Stanford University and 2011 Institute of Advanced Studies Professor-at-Large.

How can we pack balls as tightly as possible?

In other words: to squeeze as many balls as possible into a limited space, what’s the best way of arranging the balls? It’s not hard to guess what the answer should be - but it’s very hard to be sure that it really is the answer!

In this lecture Professor Venkatesh will tell the interesting story of this problem, going back to the astronomer Kepler, and ending almost four hundred years later with Thomas Hales.

He will then talk about stacking 24 dimensional oranges: what this means, how it relates to the Voyager spacecraft, and the many things we don’t know beyond this.