John Conway - Böcker

The third edition of this timely, definitive, and popular book continues to pursue the question: what is the most efficient way to pack a large number of equal spheres in n-dimensional Euclidean space? The authors also continue to examine related problems such as the kissing number problem, the covering problem, the quantizing problem, and the classification of lattices and quadratic forms. Like the previous edition, the third edition describes the applications of these questions to other areas of mathematics and science such as number theory, coding theory, group theory, analog-to-digital conversion and data compression, n-dimensional crystallography, dual theory and superstring theory in physics. Of special interest to the third edtion is a brief report on some recent developments in the field and an updated and enlarged Supplementary Bibliography with over 800 items.

We now apply the algorithm above to find the 121 orbits of norm -2 vectors from the (known) nann 0 vectors, and then apply it again to find the 665 orbits of nann -4 vectors from the vectors of nann 0 and -2. The neighbors of a strictly 24 dimensional odd unimodular lattice can be found as follows. If a norm -4 vector v E II . corresponds to the sum 25 1 of a strictly 24 dimensional odd unimodular lattice A and a !-dimensional lattice, then there are exactly two nonn-0 vectors of ll25,1 having inner product -2 with v, and these nann 0 vectors correspond to the two even neighbors of A. The enumeration of the odd 24-dimensional lattices. Figure 17.1 shows the neighborhood graph for the Niemeier lattices, which has a node for each Niemeier lattice. If A and B are neighboring Niemeier lattices, there are three integral lattices containing A n B, namely A, B, and an odd unimodular lattice C (cf. [Kne4]). An edge is drawn between nodes A and B in Fig. 17.1 for each strictly 24-dimensional unimodular lattice arising in this way. Thus there is a one-to-one correspondence between the strictly 24-dimensional odd unimodular lattices and the edges of our neighborhood graph. The 156 lattices are shown in Table 17 .I. Figure I 7. I also shows the corresponding graphs for dimensions 8 and 16.