The Hungarian mathematician Farkas Bolyai (1775–1856) published in his principal work (‘Tentamen’, 1832–33 [Bol04]) a dense regular packing of equal circles in an equilateral triangle (see Fig. 1). He defined an infinite packing series and investigated the limit of vacuitas (in Latin, the gap in the triangle outside the circles). It is interesting that these packings are not always optimal in s...

We describe a new numerical procedure for generating dense packings of disks and spheres inside various geometric shapes. We believe that in some of the smaller cases, these packings are in fact optimal. When applied to the previously studied cases of packing n equal disks in a square, the procedure confirms all the previous record packings [NO1] [NO2] [GL], except for n = 32, 37, 48, and 50 di...

In this paper some properties of optimal solutions for the problem of packing n equal circles into the unit square will be derived. In particular, properties, which must be satissed by at least one optimal solution of the problem and stating the intuitive fact that as many circles as possible should touch the boundary of the unit square, will be introduced.

The problem of nding the maximum radius of n non-overlapping equal circles in a unit square is considered. A computer-aided method for proving global optimality of such packings is presented. This method is based on recent results by De Groot, Monagan, Peik-ert, and WWrtz. As an example, it is shown how the method can be used to get an optimality proof for the case n = 7, which has not earlier ...

Let S be a square of side s in the Euclidean plane. A pucking of circles in S is nothing else but a finite family of circular disks included in S whose interiors are pairwise disjoints. A natural problem related with such packings is the description of the densest ones; in particular, what is the greatest value of the common radius r of n circles forming a packing of S? Clearly, the centres of ...