Soddy Nests

A Soddy nest is formed by putting three circles into a big circle, all four tangent to one another, then adding more circles, each tangent to three mutually tangent circles. For information about Soddy's Theorem, see for example Soddy Circles at Mathworld.

In these examples, all the radii have the form 1/n where n is a whole number. They were inspired by A. R. Wilks's wall-size printout of the basic nest (1 \ 2, 2, 3, 3, . . . ) at AT&T. All are in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF).


Col. George Sicherman [ HOME | MAIL ]