Having done four years of packing my daughter's belongings into a car for college, I can safely safely say that the real answer is "whatever she owns," but obviously that's not scientific. And the science turns out to be a bit more complicated, even when setting rules (so things have to be convex and symmetric). A fun read, albeit one without a mathematical proof to tie things up neatly (i.e., this is about the journey, not the destination).
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21 sats \ 2 replies \ @south_korea_ln 21h
Always fun reads those packing problem studies. I've never looked into potential applications of the math developed for these theories. I wonder if there are.
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144 sats \ 1 reply \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears OP 20h
I figure it's got to have some use in the logistics field, although I'm also guessing most of what's needed is known (square/rectangular containers). Beyond that, as with so many thing that seem cool/interesting, I'm not sure there's anything else there, but since I'm not a scientist, I can just still enjoy it. :-)
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln 19h
I guess there must be some theories in crystallography that may benefit from this kind of knowledge. These days a lot is being brute-forced though, so intuitive geometric arguments are getting less popular.
I suddenly also remember the video @Scroogey had linked where error-correcting codes have some link with the problem of optimally packing circles. At the time, I only watched the first one of the linked videos in #852443, I should watch the second one too.
Indeed, for logistics, I think they won't care about a 0.01% packing improvement ;)
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 22h
Packed many a delivery van in my day when I had my business. Round items were usually the biggest pain in the ass.
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