If you are a teacher then please also visit my new site: intermathematics.com for over 2000+ pdf pages of resources for teaching IB maths!

Sphere packing problem: Pyramid design

Sphere packing problems are a maths problems which have been considered over many centuries – they concern the optimal way of packing spheres so that the wasted space is minimised.  You can achieve an average packing density of around 74% when you stack many spheres together, but today I want to explore the packing density of 4 spheres (pictured above) enclosed in a pyramid.

Considering 2 dimensions

First I’m going to consider the 2D cross section of the base 3 spheres.  Each sphere will have a radius of 1.  I will choose A so that it is at the origin.  Using some basic Pythagoras this will give the following coordinates:

Finding the centre

Next I will stack my single sphere on top of these 3, with the centre of this sphere directly in the middle.  Therefore I need to find the coordinate of D.  I can use the fact that ABC is an equilateral triangle and so:

3D coordinates

Next I can convert my 2D coordinates into 3D coordinates.  I define the centre of the 3 base circles to have 0 height, therefore I can add z coordinates of 0.  E will be the coordinate point with the same x and y coordinates as D, but with a height, a, which I don’t yet know:

In order to find a I do a quick sketch, seen below:

Here I can see that I can find the length AD using trig, and then the height DE (which is my a value) using Pythagoras:

Drawing spheres

The general equation for spheres with centre coordinate (a,b,c) and radius 1 is:

Therefore the equation of my spheres are:

Plotting these on Geogebra gives:

Drawing a pyramid

Next I want to try to draw a pyramid such that it encloses the spheres.  This is quite difficult to do algebraically – so I’ll use some technology and a bit of trial and error.

First I look at creating a base for my pyramid.  I’ll try and construct an equilateral triangle which is a tangent to the spheres:

This gives me an equilateral triangle with lengths 5.54. I can then find the coordinate points of F,G,H and plot them in 3D.  I’ll choose point E so that it remains in the middle of the shape, and also has a height of 5.54 from the base. This gives the following:

As we can see, this pyramid does not enclose the spheres fully.  So, let’s try again, this time making the base a little bit larger than the 3 spheres:

This gives me an equilateral triangle with lengths 6.6.  Taking the height of the pyramid to also be 6.6 gives the following shape:

This time we can see that it fully encloses the spheres.  So, let’s find the density of this packing.  We have:

Therefore this gives:

and we also have:

Therefore the density of our packaging is:

Given our diagram this looks about right – we are only filling less than half of the available volume with our spheres.

Comparison with real data

[Source: Minimizing the object dimensions in circle and sphere packing problems]

We can see that this task has been attempted before using computational power – the table above shows the average density for a variety of 2D and 3D shapes.  The pyramid here was found to have a density of 46% – so our result of 44% looks pretty close to what we should be able to achieve.  We could tweak our measurements to see if we could improve this density.

So, a nice mixture of geometry, graphical software, and trial and error gives us a nice result.  You could explore the densities for other 2D and 3D shapes and see how close you get to the results in the table.

Essential resources for IB students:

1) Revision Village

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Revision Village has been put together to help IB students with topic revision both for during the course and for the end of Year 12 school exams and Year 13 final exams.  I would strongly recommend students use this as a resource during the course (not just for final revision in Y13!) There are specific resources for HL and SL students for both Analysis and Applications.

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There is a comprehensive Questionbank takes you to a breakdown of each main subject area (e.g. Algebra, Calculus etc) and then provides a large bank of graded questions.  What I like about this is that you are given a difficulty rating, as well as a mark scheme and also a worked video tutorial.  Really useful!

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The Practice Exams section takes you to a large number of ready made quizzes, exams and predicted papers.   These all have worked solutions and allow you to focus on specific topics or start general revision.  This also has some excellent challenging questions for those students aiming for 6s and 7s.

Essential Resources for IB Teachers

1) Intermathematics.com

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If you are a teacher then please also visit my new site.  This has been designed specifically for teachers of mathematics at international schools.  The content now includes over 2000 pages of pdf content for the entire SL and HL Analysis syllabus and also the SL Applications syllabus.  Some of the content includes:

  1. Original pdf worksheets (with full worked solutions) designed to cover all the syllabus topics.  These make great homework sheets or in class worksheets – and are each designed to last between 40 minutes and 1 hour.
  2. Original Paper 3 investigations (with full worked solutions) to develop investigative techniques and support both the exploration and the Paper 3 examination.
  3. Over 150 pages of Coursework Guides to introduce students to the essentials behind getting an excellent mark on their exploration coursework.
  4. A large number of enrichment activities such as treasure hunts, quizzes, investigations, Desmos explorations, Python coding and more – to engage IB learners in the course.

There is also a lot more.  I think this could save teachers 200+ hours of preparation time in delivering an IB maths course – so it should be well worth exploring!

Essential Resources for both IB teachers and IB students

1) Exploration Guides and Paper 3 Resources

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I’ve put together a 168 page Super Exploration Guide to talk students and teachers through all aspects of producing an excellent coursework submission.  Students always make the same mistakes when doing their coursework – get the inside track from an IB moderator!  I have also made Paper 3 packs for HL Analysis and also Applications students to help prepare for their Paper 3 exams.  The Exploration Guides can be downloaded here and the Paper 3 Questions can be downloaded here.