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by gjm11 2089 days ago
Pedantic note: footnote 1 (supporting the statement that there's nontrivial mathematics behind circle packings) links to two Wikipedia pages, for "Circle packing" and "Circle packing theorem"; the first of those is actually completely irrelevant because it's about how densely you can pack fixed-size circles into a given space, a topic that turns out to have basically nothing to do with the sort of circle packing that's actually relevant to the article.

(Thurston should really have used a different term. "Circle tiling", perhaps.)

1 comments

I love pendantic notes! Steiner chains, Thurston's notion of circle packing and circle packing as an optimization problem are quite different from a theoretical point of view. However, they all have one thing in common, and that is that the end result is an arrangement of circles that you may or may not be able to turn into a lamp :)
Pendantic lamp. Pedantic note. :-)