Seven mutually touching infinite cylinders — mentioned by lifthrasiir

Sat, 05 Apr 2014 20:19:46 GMT

It is not a matter of rational numbers, since the solution is likely to be an irrational number. The paper [1] describes a system of 20 polynomial equations with 20 variables (Equations 10--12) and solving them is no trivial task. To the end, authors first numerically found candidate solutions up to some ten decimal digits [2] and used specialized tools to prove (!) that there exists a real solution sufficiently close to given numerical solution. It turns out that there are several ways (and corresponding implementations) to do that, e.g. alphaCertified [3]. [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.5164…

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Seven mutually touching infinite cylinders · HackerPapers discussions

Seven mutually touching infinite cylinders — mentioned by lifthrasiir