Por Ana Rita Pires (University of Edinburgh).

The Kepler conjecture was about packing three-dimensional spheres into three-dimensional space as densely as possible. A related question is: if we are packing k spheres of radius 1 into a bigger sphere, what is the minimum possible size of that bigger sphere?

In this talk, we will look at a continuous and symplectic version of this question - and explain what symplectic means! - and see that the answer includes a function whose graph is an infinite staircase determined by the Fibonacci numbers.