I just thought of a new kind of packing problem, a mutant extension of the Thomson problem. In this version, each particle has coordinates in two independent spaces; in each it is confined to a sphere (of some dimension). In each space, pairs of particles repel each other with a force inversely proportional to the square of their distance in the other space.

(I was imagining a head with striped hairs, as one does, and considered making each hair’s phase anti-correlated with those of its neighbors, and what that would mean.)