Alvaro Gonzalez Hernandez - Circle Packing Cheesecakes

A circle packing is a way of arranging circles inside a given boundary such that no two overlap and some of them are mutually tangent.

The simplest way of creating a circle packing is by placing the centres of the circles in a square grid. However, if we are interested in getting the densest circle packing possible, we must place the centres of the circles in a hexagonal lattice, as in a honeycomb. This picture shows an application of circle packings to solve the problem of how to add the most blueberries to a cheesecake without making a mess while cutting it.

Alvaro Gonzalez Hernandez is a postgraduate student at St Peter's College.