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Mathematicians discover new way for spheres to 'kiss'

A new proof marks the first progress in decades on important cases of the so-called kissing problem. Getting there meant doing away with traditional approaches.

While working on a class project, she came up with a deceptively simple idea that has now allowed her and her professor, Henry Cohn, to improve estimates of the kissing number in a particularly challenging cluster of dimensions: 17 through 21. “Usually, you work with a very strong symmetric lattice,” said Oleg Musin of the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, who proved the optimal kissing number in dimension four in 2003. In 1967, for instance, the mathematician John Leech used an incredibly efficient code — famous for its later use by NASA to communicate with its Voyager probes — to construct a lattice of points that now bears his name.

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