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List of shapes with known packing constant

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJan 6, 2026
Entity authorityQ18355780 ↗
Source-derived summary

The packing constant of a geometric body is the largest average density achieved by packing arrangements of congruent copies of the body. For most bodies the value of the packing constant is unknown. The following is a list of bodies in Euclidean spaces whose packing constant is known. Fejes Tóth proved that in the plane, a point symmetric body has a packing constant that is equal to its translative packing constant and its lattice packing constant. Therefore, any such body for which the lattice packing constant was previously known, such as any ellipse, consequently has a known packing constant. In addition to these bodies, the packing constants of hyperspheres in 8 and 24 dimensions are almost exactly known.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “List of shapes with known packing constant” is wikimedia list article. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through List, shapes and known, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 118-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, List, shapes and known is the immediate research focus.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18355780. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

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This entry incorporates text from “List of shapes with known packing constant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.