Mathematicians Complete Quest To Build Spherical Cubes' - Quanta Magazine

We care about your data, and we'd like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience.
Please agree and read more about our privacy policy.
AGREE
GEO M E T RY
Mathematicians Complete Quest to Build ‘Spherical Cubes’
By J O R D A N A C E P E L E W I C Z
February 10, 2023
Is it possible to fill space “cubically” with shapes that act like spheres? A proof at the intersection of geometry and theoretical computer
science says yes.
10
DVDP for Quanta Magazine

I
n the fourth century, the Greek mathematician Pappus of Alexandria praised bees for their
We care about your data, and we'd like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience. Please agree and read more about our privacy policy.
“geometrical forethought.” The hexagonal structure of their honeycomb seemed like the
optimal way to partition two-dimensional space into cells of equal area and minimal perimeter
— allowing the insects to cut down on how much wax they needed to produce, and to spend less time
and energy building their hive.
Or so Pappus and others hypothesized. For millennia, nobody could prove that hexagons were optimal
— until finally, in 1999, the mathematician Thomas Hales showed that no other shape could do better.
Today, mathematicians still don’t know which shapes can tile three or more dimensions with the
smallest possible surface area.
This “foam” problem has turned out to have wide-ranging applications — for physicists studying the
behavior of soap bubbles (or foams) and chemists analyzing the structure of crystals, for
mathematicians exploring sphere-packing arrangements and statisticians developing effective data-
processing techniques.
In the mid-2000s, a particular formulation of the foam problem also caught the eye of theoretical
computer scientists, who discovered, to their surprise, that it was deeply connected to an important
open problem in their field. They were able to use that connection to find a new high-dimensional
shape of minimal surface area.
“I love this back-and-forth,” said Assaf Naor of Princeton University. “Some old mathematics
becomes relevant to computer science; computer science pays back and solves the question in
mathematics. It’s very nice when this happens.”
But that shape, though optimal, was missing something important: a geometric foundation. Because
its existence had been proved using techniques from computer science, its actual geometry was hard to
grasp. That’s what Naor, along with Oded Regev, a computer scientist at the Courant Institute at New
York University, set out to correct in a proof posted online last month.
“It’s a very nice end to the story,” Regev said.
Cubical Foams
Mathematicians have considered other versions of the foam problem — including what happens if
you’re only allowed to partition space according to what’s called the integer lattice. In that version of
the problem, you take a square array of evenly spaced points (each 1 unit apart) and make each of those
points the center of a shape. The “cubical” foam problem asks what the minimal surface area will be
when you’re required to tile space in this way.
Researchers were initially interested in imposing this restriction in order to understand properties of
topological spaces called manifolds. But the question took on a life of its own, becoming relevant in
data analysis and other applications.
Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

It’s also geometrically interesting, because it changes what “optimal” might mean. In two dimensions,
for instance, regular hexagons can no longer tile the plane if they can only be shifted by integer
amounts in the horizontal and vertical directions. (You have to move them by irrational amounts in one
of the two directions.)
Squares can. But is that the best that can be done? As the mathematician Jaigyoung Choe discovered in
1989, the answer is no. The optimal shape is instead a hexagon that has been squashed in one direction
and elongated in another. (The perimeter of such a hexagon is approximately 3.86 when its area is 1 —
beating out the square’s perimeter of 4.)
These differences might seem trivial, but they get much larger in higher dimensions.
Among all shapes of a given volume, the one that minimizes surface area is the sphere. As n, the
number of dimensions, grows, the sphere’s surface area increases in proportion to the square root of n.
But spheres can’t tile a space without leaving gaps. On the other hand, an n-dimensional cube of
volume 1 can. The catch is that its surface area is 2n, growing in direct proportion to its dimension. A
10,000-dimensional cube of volume 1 has a surface area of 20,000 — much bigger than 400, the
approximate surface area of a 10,000-dimensional sphere.
And so researchers wondered if they could find a “spherical cube” — a shape that tiles n-dimensional
space, like a cube, but whose surface area grows slowly, like a sphere’s.
It seemed unlikely. “If you want your bubble to exactly fill up space and be centered on this cubical
grid, it’s hard to think about what you would use except for a cubical bubble,” said Ryan O’Donnell, a
theoretical computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. “It really seems that the cube should be
the best.”
We now know that it isn’t.
The Hardness of Hard Problems
For decades, the cubical foam problem went relatively unexplored in higher dimensions. The first
researchers to make progress on it came not from the realm of geometry but from theoretical computer
science. They came across it by chance, while in search of a way to prove a central statement in their
field known as the unique games conjecture. “The unique games conjecture,” Regev said, “is what I
view currently as the biggest open question in theoretical computer science.”
Proposed in 2002 by Subhash Khot, a graduate student at the time, the conjecture posits that if a
particular problem — one that involves assigning colors to the nodes of a network — can’t be solved
exactly, then finding even an approximate solution is very hard. If true, the conjecture would allow
researchers to understand the complexity of a vast assortment of other computational tasks in one fell
swoop.
Mathematicians believe that a shape called the Weaire-Phelan structure tiles 3D space with minimal
surface area. While they have yet to prove it, physical experiments provide additional support for this
hypothesis. Researchers at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, filled a special mold with soap bubbles
and found that they naturally arranged themselves into the Weaire-Phelan pattern.
Ruggero Gabbrielli
Computer scientists often classify tasks based on whether they can be solved with an efficient
algorithm, or whether they are instead “NP-hard” (meaning they can’t be efficiently solved as the size
of the problem grows, so long as a widely believed but unproved conjecture about computational
complexity is true). For instance, the traveling salesperson problem, which asks for the shortest path
needed to visit every city in a network only once, is NP-hard. So is determining whether a graph — a
collection of vertices connected by edges — can be labeled with at most three colors so that any two
connected vertices have different colors.
It turns out that it’s NP-hard to find even an approximate solution to many of these tasks. Say you
want to label the vertices of a graph with different colors in a way that satisfies some list of constraints.
If it’s NP-hard to satisfy all of those constraints, what about trying to fulfill just 90% of them, or 75%,
or 50%? Below some threshold, it might be possible to come up with an efficient algorithm, but above
that threshold, the problem becomes NP-hard.
For decades, computer scientists have worked to nail down thresholds for different optimization
problems of interest. But some questions evade this kind of description. While an algorithm might
guarantee 80% of the best solution, it might be NP-hard to achieve 95% of the best solution, leaving
unsettled the question of where exactly between 80% and 95% the problem tips into NP-hard territory.
The unique games conjecture, or UGC, offers a way to immediately pinpoint the answer. It makes a
statement that at first seems more limited: that it is NP-hard to tell the difference between a graph for
which you can satisfy almost all of a certain set of coloring constraints (say, more than 99%) and a
graph for which you can satisfy barely any (say, less than 1%).
But shortly after the UGC was proposed in 2002, researchers showed that if the conjecture is true, then
you can easily compute the hardness threshold for any constraint satisfaction problem. (This is
because the UGC also implies that a known algorithm achieves the best possible approximation for all
of these problems.) “It was precisely the linchpin for all these optimization problems,” O’Donnell said.
And so theoretical computer scientists set out to prove the UGC — a task that ultimately led some of
them to discover spherical cubes.
Making Hard Problems Harder
In 2005, O’Donnell was working at Microsoft Research. He and two colleagues — Uriel Feige, now at
the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Guy Kindler, now at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem —
teamed up to tackle the UGC.
They had a vague idea of how they wanted to proceed. They would start with a question about graphs —
one that’s very similar to the UGC. The so-called maximum cut (“max-cut”) problem asks, when given
a graph, how to partition its vertices into two sets (or colors) so that the number of edges connecting
those sets is as large as possible. (You can think of max cut as a question about the best way to color a
graph with two colors, so that as few edges as possible connect vertices of the same color.)
If the UGC is true, it would imply that, given some random graph, an efficient approximation algorithm
can only get within about 87% of the true max cut of that graph. Doing any better would be NP-hard.
Feige, Kindler and O’Donnell instead wanted to go in the opposite direction: They hoped to show that
max cut is hard to approximate, and then use that to prove the UGC. Their plan relied on the strength of
a technique called parallel repetition — a clever strategy that makes hard problems harder.
Say you know that it’s NP-hard to distinguish between a problem you can solve and one you can mostly
solve. Parallel repetition enables you to build on that to show a much stronger hardness result: that it’s
also NP-hard to distinguish between a problem you can solve and one you can barely solve at all. “This
nonintuitive, deep phenomenon … is in the guts of a lot of computer science today,” Naor said.
But there’s a catch. Parallel repetition doesn’t always amplify a problem’s hardness as much as
computer scientists want it to. In particular, there are aspects of the max-cut problem that “create a
big headache for parallel repetition,” Regev said.
Feige, Kindler and O’Donnell focused on showing that parallel repetition could work despite the
headaches. “This is a really complicated thing to analyze,” said Dana Moshkovitz, a theoretical
computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin. “But this seemed tantalizingly close. Parallel
repetition seemed like it would [help make] this connection from max cut to unique games.”
As a warmup, the researchers tried to understand parallel repetition for a simple case of max cut, what
Moshkovitz called “the stupidest max cut.” Consider an odd number of vertices connected by edges to
form a circle, or “odd cycle.” You want to label each vertex with one of two colors so that no pair of
adjacent vertices have the same color. In this case, that’s impossible: One edge will always connect
vertices of the same color. You have to delete that edge, “breaking” the odd cycle, to get your graph to
satisfy the problem’s constraint. Ultimately, you want to minimize the total fraction of edges you need
to delete to properly color your graph.
Parallel repetition allows you to consider a high-dimensional version of this problem — one in which
you have to break all the odd cycles that appear. Feige, Kindler and O’Donnell needed to show that as
the number of dimensions gets very large, you have to delete a very large fraction of edges to break all
the odd cycles. If that was true, it would mean parallel repetition could effectively amplify the hardness
of this “stupid max-cut” problem.
That’s when the team discovered a curious coincidence: There was a geometric way to interpret
whether parallel repetition would work the way they hoped it would. The secret lay in the surface area
of cubical foams.
From Lemons to Lemonade
Their problem, rewritten in the language of foams, boiled down to showing that spherical cubes cannot
exist — that it’s impossible to partition high-dimensional space along the integer lattice into cells with
surface area much smaller than that of the cube. (A larger surface area corresponds to needing to delete
more “bad” edges in the odd-cycles graph, as the computer scientists hoped to show.)
“We were like, oh, what a weird geometry problem, but that’s probably true, right?” O’Donnell said.
“We really needed that to be the true answer.” But he, Feige and Kindler couldn’t prove it. So in 2007,
they published a paper outlining how they planned to use this problem to help attack the UGC.
Soon enough, their hopes were dashed.
Ran Raz, a theoretical computer scientist at Princeton who had already proved several major results
about parallel repetition, was intrigued by their paper. He decided to analyze parallel repetition for the
odd-cycle problem, in part because of the connection to geometry that Feige, Kindler and O’Donnell
had uncovered.
Raz didn’t start with the foam problem but attacked the computer science version of the question
head-on. He showed that you can get away with deleting far fewer edges to break all the odd cycles in a
graph. In other words, parallel repetition can’t sufficiently amplify the hardness of this max-cut
problem. “The parameters that one gets from parallel repetition exactly, exactly fall short of giving
this,” Moshkovitz said.
The computer scientist Ran Raz’s work on parallel repetition “is in the guts of a lot of computer science
today,” as Assaf Naor puts it.
David Kelly Crow
“Our plan to use parallel repetition to show the hardness of unique games didn’t even work in the
simplest case,” O’Donnell said. “This kind of broke the whole plan.”
Although disappointing, Raz’s result also hinted at the existence of spherical cubes: shapes capable of
tiling n-dimensional space with a surface area that scaled in proportion to the square root of n. “We
were like, well, let’s make lemonade out of lemons and take this disappointing technical result about
parallel repetition and discrete graphs, and turn it into a neat, interesting result in geometry,”
O’Donnell said.
He and Kindler, in collaboration with the computer scientists Anup Rao and Avi Wigderson, pored over
Raz’s proof until they’d learned its techniques well enough to translate them to the foam problem. In
2008, they showed that spherical cubes are indeed possible.
“It’s a nice way to reason about the problem,” said Mark Braverman of Princeton. “It’s beautiful.”
And it raised questions on the geometry side of the story. Because they’d used Raz’s work on parallel
repetition to construct their tiling shape, Kindler, O’Donnell, Rao and Wigderson ended up with
something ugly and Frankenstein-like. The tile was messy and full of indentations. In mathematical
terms, it was not convex. While this worked for their purposes, the spherical cube lacked properties
that mathematicians prefer — properties that make a shape more concrete, easier to define and study,
and more suitable for potential applications.
“There’s something very unsatisfying about their construction,” Regev said. “It looks like an amoeba.
It doesn’t look like what you would expect, a nice tiling body.”
That’s what he and Naor set out to find.
Breaking Free of the Cage
From the outset, Naor and Regev realized they’d have to start from scratch. “Partly because convex
bodies are so restrictive, none of the previous techniques had any chance of working,” said Dor Minzer,
a theoretical computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In fact, it was entirely plausible that convexity would be too restrictive — that a convex spherical cube
simply does not exist.
But last month, Naor and Regev proved that you can partition n-dimensional space along integer
coordinates with a convex shape whose surface area is pretty close to that of the sphere. And they did it
entirely geometrically — returning the problem to its mathematical roots.
They first had to get around a major obstacle. The cubical foam problem requires that each tile be
centered at integer coordinates. But in the integer lattice, there are very short distances between some
points — and those short distances cause trouble.
Consider a point in the two-dimensional grid. It’s located 1 unit away from its nearest points in the
horizontal and vertical directions. But in the diagonal direction, the nearest point is √2 units away — a
discrepancy that gets worse in larger spaces. In the n-dimensional integer lattice, the nearest points
are still 1 unit away, but those “diagonal” points are now √n units away. In, say, 10,000 dimensions,
this means that such “diagonal” neighbors can be as far as 100 units away even though there are
20,000 other points (one in each direction) that are only 1 unit away.
Assaf Naor (right) and Oded Regev proved the existence of spherical cubes in a geometrically natural
way.
Or Zamir
In other lattices, those two kinds of distances grow in proportion to one another. Mathematicians have
known for decades how to tile such lattices with convex shapes of minimal surface area.
But in the integer lattice, the shortest distances will always be stuck at 1. This gets in the way of
constructing a nice-looking tile of optimal surface area. “They kind of put you in this cage,” Regev
said. “They make everything very tight around you.”
So Naor and Regev instead considered a slice of the full n-dimensional space. They carefully chose this
subspace so that it would still be rich in integer points, but none of those points would be too close
together.
In other words, the subspace they ended up with was precisely the type that mathematicians already
knew how to tile optimally.
But this was only half the work. Naor and Regev needed to partition the whole space, not just a slice of
it. To get an n-dimensional spherical cube, they had to multiply their efficient tile with a tile from the
remaining space (akin to how you might multiply a two-dimensional square with a one-dimensional
line segment to get a three-dimensional cube). Doing so would lift their construction back into the
original space, but it would also increase its surface area.
The pair had to show that the tile from the remaining space, which wasn’t as optimal, didn’t add too
much to the surface area. Once they did that, their construction was complete. (Their final shape’s
surface area ended up being a little larger than that of the non-convex spherical cube, but they believe
that it might be possible to find a convex tile that’s just as efficient as its non-convex counterpart.)
“Their proof is completely different” from previous work on spherical cubes, said the mathematician
Noga Alon. “And in retrospect, it’s maybe a more natural proof. This is what someone maybe should
have tried to begin with.”
“When things are done differently,” Raz added, “sometimes you find interesting additional
implications.”
Hope Rekindled
It’s not yet clear what those implications might be — though the work taps into the potential use of
integer lattices in cryptography and other applications. Given how connected this problem is to other
fields, “it’s likely to lead to other things,” Alon said.
At the moment, computer scientists do not see a way to interpret the convex result in the language of
parallel repetition and the UGC. But they haven’t entirely given up on the original plan to use the foam
problem to prove the conjecture. “There are various ways you can try to subvert the obvious barriers
that we encountered,” Kindler said.
Braverman and Minzer tried one such way when they revisited foams in 2020. Instead of requiring that
the tiling shape be convex, they asked that it obey certain symmetries, so that it looks the same no
matter how you flip its coordinates. (In 2D, a square would work, but a rectangle would not; neither
would the high-dimensional spherical cubes described to date.) Under this new constraint, the pair was
able to show what Kindler and others had hoped to 15 years earlier: that you can’t do much better than
the surface area of the cube after all.
This corresponded to a different kind of parallel repetition — one that would make the simplest case of
max cut as hard as it needed to be. While the result offers some hope for this line of research, it’s not
clear whether this version of parallel repetition will work for all max-cut problems. “It doesn’t mean
that you are done,” Braverman said. “It just means that you are back in business.”
“There is a lot of potential in geometry,” Minzer said. “It’s just that we don’t understand it well
enough.”
Correction: February 23, 2023
An earlier version of this article said that the closest diagonal neighbors to a point in a 10,000-
dimensional integer lattice are 100 units away. These are in fact the most distant diagonal neighbors. It
also said that there are 10,000 points that are only one unit away; in fact there are 20,000 such points.
The story has been updated.

Mathematicians Complete Quest To Build Spherical Cubes' - Quanta Magazine

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Mathematicians Complete Quest To Build Spherical Cubes' - Quanta Magazine

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

We care about your data, and we'd like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience.

Please agree and read more about our privacy policy.

Mathematicians Complete Quest to Build ‘Spherical Cubes’

February 10, 2023

DVDP for Quanta Magazine

“It’s a very nice end to the story,” Regev said.

Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine

We now know that it isn’t.

The Hardness of Hard Problems

Making Hard Problems Harder

From Lemons to Lemonade

Soon enough, their hopes were dashed.

David Kelly Crow

That’s what he and Naor set out to find.

Breaking Free of the Cage

Correction: February 23, 2023

You might also like