MathsClub Problems, proofs & good company

← All problems

Keller's Conjecture

historic

Posed by Otto-Hermann Keller · 1930 · geometry / discrete mathematics · resolved 2020

The problem

Claim: in every tiling of \mathbb{R}^n by congruent unit cubes (edges parallel not required), some two cubes share a complete (n−1)-dimensional face.

History & significance

True for n ≤ 6 (Perron 1940). False for n ≥ 8: Lagarias and Shor (1992) built counterexamples via dissection methods, Mackey simplified to dimension 8 (2002), implying all higher. Only dimension 7 survived, resisting both geometric and computational assault for thirty years.