superscript

The passage around this formula

Hales made the same move on the Kepler conjecture and describes the choices involved. The formal statement was deliberately engineered for readability: all mention of measure was removed, and the theorem was formulated as a claim about finite packings inside a large ball, which introduces a boundary error term but avoids importing measure theory into the statement. Cleaned up, it reads: $\forall V.\ \operatorname{packing}(V) \implies \exists c.\ \forall r.\ 1 \le r \implies \operatorname{card}\!\left(V \cap B(0,r)\right) \le \frac{\pi r^{3}}{\sqrt{18}} + c\,r^{2}$. Every symbol here is an invitation to a fidelity question. What does packing unfold to? Is the error term doing more work than it appears? Hales notes that the constant is not explicit in the statement, and that the theorem includes no uniqueness claim [ 4 ] . None of this is concealed —…

Read this part in the article →