Origins
The conjecture was first stated by Johannes Kepler (1611) in his paper 'On the six-cornered snowflake'. He had started to study arrangements of spheres as a result of his correspondence with the English mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriot in 1606. Harriot was a friend and assistant of Sir Walter Raleigh, who had set Harriot the problem of determining how best to stack cannon balls on the decks of his ships. Harriot published a study of various stacking patterns in 1591, and went on to develop an early version of atomic theory.
Read more about this topic: Kepler Conjecture
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