Seven Cylinders in Contact w/o Using Their Ends


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By Dana Mackenzie 4:13pm, April 2, 2014
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Over 50 years ago, the popular mathematics writer Martin Gardner posed a challenge for readers of Scientific American: Can you place seven cigarettes so that each cigarette touches every one of the others?

Gardner had a solution, but it was unsatisfying because some of the cigarettes? ends touched others? sides. If that end of a cigarette were lit, it would no longer touch its neighbor. Mathematicians wondered whether an arrangement could be found with only side-to-side contacts using infinitely long cylinders.
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