# On sphere-filling ropes

• Published in 2010
In the collection
What is the longest rope on the unit sphere? Intuition tells us that the answer to this packing problem depends on the rope's thickness. For a countably infinite number of prescribed thickness values we construct and classify all solution curves. The simplest ones are similar to the seamlines of a tennis ball, others exhibit a striking resemblance to Turing patterns in chemistry, or to ordered phases of long elastic rods stuffed into spherical shells.

## Other information

arxivId
1005.4609
journal
Nature
pages
15

### BibTeX entry

@article{Gerlach2010,
abstract = {What is the longest rope on the unit sphere? Intuition tells us that the answer to this packing problem depends on the rope's thickness. For a countably infinite number of prescribed thickness values we construct and classify all solution curves. The simplest ones are similar to the seamlines of a tennis ball, others exhibit a striking resemblance to Turing patterns in chemistry, or to ordered phases of long elastic rods stuffed into spherical shells.},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
arxivId = {1005.4609},
author = {Gerlach, Henryk and von der Mosel, Heiko},
eprint = {1005.4609},
journal = {Nature},
month = {may},
pages = 15,
title = {On sphere-filling ropes},
url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4609 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1005.4609v1},
year = 2010,
primaryClass = {math.GT},
urldate = {2012-10-29},
collections = {Easily explained}
}