Microbio question

Originally posted by DeepThought
If a plane is covered with circles that do not overlap then the densest arrangement is the hexagonal lattice with each circle touching six others. So any three neighbouring circles will be just touching. We can tile the plane with equilateral triangles with their vertices on the centre points of the circles. This means that the packing density is the ...[text shortened]... In my earlier post I seem to have quoted 0.928, that is a typo and the 17,775 figure is correct.