宗传明与Jeffrey Lagarias获美国数学会2015年度Conant奖
Jeffrey
Lagarias and Chuanming Zong to Receive 2015 AMS Conant Prize
Wednesday December 3rd 2014
Jeffrey Lagarias
of the University of Michigan and Chuanming Zong of Peking University will be awarded the 2015 AMS Levi
L. Conant Prize at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January in San Antonio,
Texas. They are honored for their article "Mysteries in Packing Regular Tetrahedra" (Notices of the AMS, December 2012).
Finding the most efficient packing
arrangements for various objects has long occupied the attention of
grocers---who want to stack their oranges in as small a space as possible---and
of mathematicians. Unlike spheres, cubes can be packed with perfect efficiency,
filling out space without any gaps. More than 2000 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 equilatral
triangle. It took 1800 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. In particular, in
1900 David Hilbert listed it as a part of his 18th problem.
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.
Part of this story was told in a New York
Times article, "Packing Tetrahedrons, and Closing In on a Perfect
Fit," by Kenneth Chang (January 4, 2010).
Presented annually, the Conant Prize
recognizes the best expository paper published in either the Notices of the AMS
or the Bulletin of the AMS in the preceding five years. The prize will be
awarded at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, Sunday, January 11, 2015 at 4:25 PM,
at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas.
http://www.ams.org/