Event time:
Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - 12:15pm to 1:15pm
Location:
215 LOM
Speaker:
Henry Cohn
Speaker affiliation:
Microsoft/MIT
Event description:
What is the densest packing of congruent spheres in Euclidean space? This problem arises naturally in geometry, number theory, and information theory, but it is notoriously difficult to solve, and until recently no sharp bounds were known above three dimensions. Last spring Maryna Viazovska found a remarkable solution of the sphere packing problem in eight dimensions. In this talk I’ll describe how her breakthrough works and where it comes from, as well as follow-up work extending it to twenty-four dimensions (joint work with Kumar, Miller, Radchenko, and Viazovska).