Zong & Lagarias Win Levi L. Conant Prize

Peking University’s Zong Chuanming has become the first mathematician working in China to win the Levi L. Conant Prize.

AsianScientist (Jan. 16, 2015) – Zong Chuanming of Peking University and Jeffrey Lagarias of the University of Michigan have been awarded the 2015 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Levi L. Conant Prize. Professor Zong’s is the first mathematician working in China to be awarded the honor.

Finding the most-efficient packing arrangements for various objects has long occupied the attention of people ranging from mathematicians to grocers—who want to stack their oranges in as small a space as possible.

Unlike spheres, cubes can be packed with perfect efficiency, filling out space without any gaps. More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle conjectured that another example of a space-filling figure is the regular tetrahedron, a four-sided object in which each side is an equilateral triangle. It took 1,800 years for people to realize that Aristotle had been wrong. Ever since then, mathematicians have been searching for the most efficient ways to pack tetrahedra.

One milestone came in 2006, when John H. Conway and Salvatore Torquato found a packing of regular tetrahedra that fills 72 percent of space. This packing was surprisingly loose: Was there a more-efficient packing out there? This question stimulated a great deal of research, including work of Lagarias’ doctoral student Erica Chen, who eventually found several packings that are denser. Despite these advances, no one knows how to construct the most-efficient packing or exactly how efficient it would be. All we know for certain is that no packing of tetrahedra fills all of space.

The prize-winning article by Lagarias and Zong recounts this story, discussing the first glimmers of doubt about Aristotle’s conjecture and working up to the advances that have occurred in the last ten years. Their article beautifully shows the drama and fascination of classical problems that reveal the exquisite intricacies of our world.

The article can be found at: Lagarias and Zong (2015) Mysteries in Packing Regular Tetrahedra.

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Source: American Mathematical Society.
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