[nejsjsjsbsb]

It sort of like the visualizable 3D "kissing spheres" is the story that makes it interesting, captivating and accessible and therefore competitive/social which makes it interesting even more, but basically at higher dims it's a bunch of equations as it is impossible to visualise on human wetware.

You could do kissing starfish but no one cares as there is no lore. A bit like 125m world record doesn't matter. 100m is the thing.

This is not a knock ... it is interesting how social / tradition based maths is.

Another example is Fermat's Last Theorem. It had legendary status.

[ndsipa_pomu]

However, the use of spheres means that it is applicable to error correcting codes, whereas "kissing starfish" wouldn't be useful.