On sphere-filling ropes
- Published in 2010
- Added on
In the collections
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.
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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,Geometry,Fun maths facts} }