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Researchers at NYU devise system to count gumballs. Good for state fairs and third grade science class but, sadly, computer not included:

“It’s a mathematical problem, it’s a geometric problem, and it’s a real physical problem as well,” said Professor Jasna Brujic, a physicist who led the team that solved the query.

Johannes Kepler, the 17th-century scientist, had originally come up with a conjecture to solve the problem based on the gumballs being perfectly round, of equal size, and packed as tightly as physically possible.

Only in the last decade had scientists shown Kepler’s 400-year-old conjecture was probably right — using calculations that required high-speed computers.

Now, Brujic’s team, in a paper just published in the science journal Nature, takes things a step further — by giving a way to calculate the number of gumballs in a jar if they are of varying sizes.

The complicated formula boils down to this: It’s easiest to figure the answer if you start from the perspective of one gumball and check how many other gumballs touch it.

The team concluded that if you know the proportion of gumballs of each different size, you can figure out statistically how many are in the jar.