Outdated Archival Version

These pages are not updated anymore. They reflect the state of 20 August 2005. For the current production of this journal, please refer to http://www.math.psu.edu/era/.

This journal is archived by the American Mathematical Society. The master copy is available at http://www.ams.org/era/

The classical isoperimetric inequality states that the surface of smallest area enclosing a given volume in $R^3$ is a sphere. We show that the least area surface enclosing two equal volumes is a double bubble, a surface made of two pieces of round spheres separated by a flat disk, meeting along a single circle at an angle of $2 \pi / 3$.

Copyright Hass, Hutchings, Schlafly 1996

TeX source (14.2K)
DVI (19.2K)
PostScript (85.2K)

Article Info

• ERA Amer. Math. Soc. 01 (1995), pp. 98-102
• Publisher Identifier: S1079-6762(95)03001-0
• 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 53A10; Secondary 49Q10, 49Q25.
• Key words and phrases. Double bubble; isoperimetric
• Received by the editors September 11, 1995
• Communicated by Richard Schoen
• Comments

Joel Hass

Department of Mathematics, University of California, Davis, CA 95616

E-mail address: hass@math.ucdavis.edu

Michael Hutchings

Department of Mathematics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138

E-mail address: hutching@math.harvard.edu

Roger Schlafly

Real Software, PO Box 1680, Soquel, CA 95073

E-mail address: rschlafly@attmail.com

Hutchings was supported by an NSF Graduate Fellowship