Thomas C. Hales

The Honeycomb Conjecture

This article gives a proof of the classical honeycomb conjecture: any partition of the plane into regions of equal area has perimeter at least that of the regular hexagonal honeycomb tiling.

The sphere packing problem

Abstract The sphere packing problem asks whether any packing of spheres of equal radius in three dimensions has density exceeding that of the face-centered-cubic lattice packing (of density φ 18 ). This paper sketches a solution to this problem.

Sphere packings, I

We describe a program to prove the Kepler conjecture on sphere packings. We then carry out the first step of this program. Each packing determines a decomposition of space into Delaunay simplices, which are grouped together into finite configurations called Delaunay stars. A score, which is related to the density of packings, is assigned to each Delaunay star. We conjecture that the score of every Delaunay star is at most the score of the stars in the face-centered cubic and hexagonal close packings. This conjecture implies the Kepler conjecture. To complete the first step of the program, we show that every Delaunay star that satisfies a certain regularity condition satisfies the conjecture.

Historical Overview of the Kepler Conjecture

AbstractThis paper is the first in a series of six papers devoted to the proof of the Kepler conjecture, which asserts that no packing of congruent balls in three dimensions has density greater than the face-centered cubic packing. After some preliminary comments about the face-centered cubic and hexagonal close packings, the history of the Kepler problem is described, including a discussion of various published bounds on the density of sphere packings. There is also a general historical discussion of various proof strategies that have been tried with this problem.

A Formulation of the Kepler Conjecture

AbstractThis paper is the second in a series of six papers devoted to the proof of the Kepler conjecture, which asserts that no packing of congruent balls in three dimensions has density greater than the face-centered cubic packing. The top level structure of the proof is described. A compact topological space is described. Each point of this space can be described as a finite cluster of balls with additional combinatorial markings. A continuous function on this compact space is defined. It is proved that the Kepler conjecture will follow if the value of this function is never greater than a given explicit constant.

Sphere Packings, II

Abstract. An earlier paper describes a program to prove the Kepler conjecture on sphere packings. This paper carries out the second step of that program. A sphere packing leads to a decomposition of R3 into polyhedra. The polyhedra are divided into two classes. The first class of polyhedra, called quasi-regular tetrahedra, have density at most that of a regular tetrahedron. The polyhedra in the remaining class have density at most that of a regular octahedron (about 0.7209).

Formal Verification of Nonlinear Inequalities with Taylor Interval Approximations

We present a formal tool for verification of multivariate nonlinear inequalities. Our verification method is based on interval arithmetic with Taylor approximations. Our tool is implemented in the HOL Light proof assistant and it is capable to verify multivariate nonlinear polynomial and non-polynomial inequalities on rectangular domains. One of the main features of our work is an efficient implementation of the verification procedure which can prove non-trivial high-dimensional inequalities in several seconds. We developed the verification tool as a part of the Flyspeck project (a formal proof of the Kepler conjecture). The Flyspeck project includes about 1000 nonlinear inequalities. We successfully tested our method on more than 100 Flyspeck inequalities and estimated that the formal verification procedure is about 3000 times slower than an informal verification method implemented in C++. We also describe future work and prospective optimizations for our method.

What is motivic measure

These notes give an exposition of the theory of arithmetic motivic integration, as developed by J. Denef and F. Loeser. An appendix by M. Fried gives some historical comments on Galois stratifications.

Orbital integrals are motivic

This article shows that under general conditions, p-adic orbital integrals of definable functions are represented as the trace of a Frobenius operator on a virtual motive. This gives an explicit example of the philosophy of Denef and Loeser, which predicts that all naturally occurring p-adic integrals are motivic.

Good orbital integrals

This paper concerns a class of orbital integrals in Lie algebras over p-adic fields. The values of these orbital integrals at the unit element in the Hecke algebra count points on varieties over finite fields. The construction, which is based on motivic integration, works both in characteristic zero and in positive characteristic. As an application, the Fundamental Lemma for this class of integrals is lifted from positive characteristic to characteristic zero. The results are based on a formula for orbital integrals as distributions inflated from orbits in the quotient spaces of the Moy-Prasad filtrations of the Lie algebra. This formula is established by Fourier analysis on these quotient spaces.