Honeycomb conjecture

The honeycomb conjecture states that a regular hexagonal grid or honeycomb has the least total perimeter of any subdivision of the plane into regions of equal area.

The conjecture was proven in 1999 by mathematician Thomas C.

, subdividing the plane into regions (connected components of the complement of

per unit area is at least as large as for the hexagon tiling.

has additional components that are unbounded or whose area is not one; allowing these additional components cannot shorten

covered by bounded unit-area components.

The value on the right hand side of the inequality is the limiting length per unit area of the hexagonal tiling.

The first record of the conjecture dates back to 36 BC, from Marcus Terentius Varro, but is often attributed to Pappus of Alexandria (c. 290 – c. 350).

[2] In the 17th century, Jan Brożek used a similar theorem to argue why bees create hexagonal honeycombs.

In 1943, László Fejes Tóth published a proof for a special case of the conjecture, in which each cell is required to be a convex polygon.

[3] The full conjecture was proven in 1999 by mathematician Thomas C. Hales, who mentions in his work that there is reason to believe that the conjecture may have been present in the minds of mathematicians before Varro.

The case when the problem is restricted to a square grid was solved in 1989 by Jaigyoung Choe who proved that the optimal figure is an irregular hexagon.