Distributing many points on a sphere (Q1361150)

Distributing a large number of points uniformly over the surface of a sphere is not only an attractive problem for mathematicians, but has various applications to physics, chemistry and biology. In this article the authors survey the basic problems and results, and in particular they emphasize the relation between geometry arguments and energy arguments. In the second part they discuss various asymptotic results by themselves and other authors including spherical designs, equal-area partitioning uniform distribution, discrepancy and algorithmic aspects. The article is decorated by some excellent figures.