> In two dimensions, the answer is clearly six: Put a penny on a table, and you’ll find that when you arrange another six pennies around it, they fit snugly into a daisylike pattern.
Is there an intuitive reason for why 6 fits so perfectly? Like, it could be a small gap somewhere, like in 3d when it's 12, but it isn't. Something to do with tessellation and hexagons, perhaps?
> They look for ways to arrange spheres as symmetrically as possible. But there’s still a possibility that the best arrangements might look a lot weirder.
Like square packing for 11 looks just crazy (not same problem, but similar): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_packing
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