From Kepler to Hales , and Back to Hilbert
نویسندگان
چکیده
In layman’s terms the Kepler Conjecture from 1611 is often phrased like “There is no way to stack oranges better than greengrocers do at their fruit stands” and one might add: all over the world and for centuries already. While it is not far from the truth this is also an open invitation to a severe misunderstanding. The true Kepler Conjecture speaks about infinitely many oranges while most grocers deal with only finitely many. Packing finitely many objects, for instance, within some kind of bin, is a well-studied subject in optimization. On the other hand, turning the Kepler Conjecture into a finite optimization problem was a first major step, usually attributed to László Fejes Tóth [5]. Finally, only a little bit less than 400 years after Johannes Kepler, Thomas C. Hales in 1998 announced a complete proof which he had obtained, partially with the help of his graduate student Samuel P. Ferguson [7]. There are many very readable introductions to the proof, its details, and the history, for instance, by Hales himself [8] [10]. Here I will make no attempt to compete with these presentations, but rather I would like to share an opinion on the impact of the Kepler Conjecture and its history for mathematics in general.
منابع مشابه
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تاریخ انتشار 2012