"Sphere packings is one of the most fascinating and challenging subjects in mathematics. Almost four centuries ago, Kepler studied the densities of sphere packings and made his famous conjecture. Several decades later, Gregory and Newton discussed the kissing numbers of spheres and proposed the Gregory-Newton problem. Since then, these problems and related ones have attracted the attention of many prominent mathematicians."--BOOK JACKET. "This tract gives full account of this subject. In addition to the classical sphere packing problems, it also deals with the contemporary ones; such as, blocking light rays, the holes in sphere packings, and finite sphere packings. Not only are the main results of the subject presented, but also its creative methods from areas such as geometry, number theory, and linear programming are described. The book also contains short biographies of several masters of this discipline and many open problems."--BOOK JACKET.