20 February 2018 at 16:00

Organised in collaboration with the School of Mathematics, University of Bristol, UK

The sphere Packing Problem in Dimensions 8 and 24

Henry Cohn, Microsoft Research, Massachusetts, USA

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. In 2016 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).

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