login
The OEIS is supported by the many generous donors to the OEIS Foundation.

 

Logo
Hints
(Greetings from The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences!)
A268487 Numbers of equal electric charges for which the minimum-potential dislocation on a sphere has nonzero sum of position vectors. 3

%I #32 Mar 31 2016 13:42:17

%S 11,13,19,21,25,26,31,33,35,43,47,49,52,53,54,55,59,61,65,66,71,73,74,

%T 76,79,81,83,84,85,86,87,89,91,93,95,96,97,98,99,103,107,108,109,114,

%U 115,116,117,118,119,120,121,123,125,128,129

%N Numbers of equal electric charges for which the minimum-potential dislocation on a sphere has nonzero sum of position vectors.

%C Probably most of these terms are merely conjectural. - _N. J. A. Sloane_, Mar 31 2016

%C Given m identical point charges located on a sphere, their minimum-potential dislocation (the Thomson problem) may, but need not, have high enough symmetry for the sum of their position vectors Sum[i=1..m](r_i) to be zero. This sequence lists, in increasing order, the values of m for which the sum is nonzero.

%C Numeric investigations were carried out by various authors for m = 1 to 204, and then for a number of selected cases (see references in the Wikipedia link). Among the studied cases, 312 is also known to belong to this sequence. All these cases have at most some type of C-symmetry (C_2,C_2v,C_s,C_3,C_3v). So far, 10 cases with no symmetry at all (C_1) were found, namely m = 61, 140, 149, 176, 179, 183, 186, 191, 194, 199. No simple algorithm to handle this open problem, nor a general formula, are known.

%H Stanislav Sykora, <a href="/A268487/b268487.txt">Table of n, a(n) for n = 1..100</a>

%H Steve Smale, <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF03025291">Mathematical Problems for the Next Century</a>, Mathematical Intelligencer, 20 (1998), 7-15.

%H Wikipedia, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_problem">Thomson problem</a>

%K nonn,hard

%O 1,1

%A _Stanislav Sykora_, Feb 08 2016

Lookup | Welcome | Wiki | Register | Music | Plot 2 | Demos | Index | Browse | More | WebCam
Contribute new seq. or comment | Format | Style Sheet | Transforms | Superseeker | Recents
The OEIS Community | Maintained by The OEIS Foundation Inc.

License Agreements, Terms of Use, Privacy Policy. .

Last modified April 25 07:53 EDT 2024. Contains 371964 sequences. (Running on oeis4.)