Abstract
This paper is the first in a series of six papers devoted to the proof of the Kepler conjecture, which asserts that no packing of congruent balls in three dimensions has density greater than the face-centered cubic packing. After some preliminary comments about the face-centered cubic and hexagonal close packings, the history of the Kepler problem is described, including a discussion of various published bounds on the density of sphere packings. There is also a general historical discussion of various proof strategies that have been tried with this problem.
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Hales, T. Historical Overview of the Kepler Conjecture. Discrete Comput Geom 36, 5–20 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00454-005-1210-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00454-005-1210-2