Gaps in convex disc packings with an application to 1-Steiner minimum trees (Q1974018)

The convex disc packings of the title are Hadwiger configurations of a planar convex disc \({\mathcal C}\): a set of mutually non-overlapping translates of \({\mathcal C}\) such that each translate touches but does not overlap \({\mathcal C}\). It is well known that the Hadwiger number of \({\mathcal C}\) (= the maximum size of a Hadwiger configuration of \({\mathcal C)}\) is 6 if \({\mathcal C}\) is not a parallelogram and 8 if \({\mathcal C}\) is a parallelogram. In the former case there is a natural clockwise order to the 6 translates, and two consecutive translates have a gap if they do not touch. The author proves that such a configuration (whose Hadwiger number is 6) has at most 2 gaps. He also characterizes the convex discs which have 0, 1 or 2 gaps. In the application to 1-Steiner minimum trees in a Minkowski plane he shows that the Steiner point has largest degree 5 except if the unit ball is not an affine regular hexagon.