Mathematicians crack 44-year-old problem

Israel Institute of Technology and Alexandr Polyanskii from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) have proved László Fejes Tóth’s zone conjecture. Formulated in 1973, it says that if a unit sphere is completely covered by several zones, their combined width is at least π. The proof, published in the journal Geometric and Functional Analysis, is important for discrete geometry and enables mathematicians to formulate new problems.