High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In geometry, Tammes problem is a problem in packing a given number of circles on the surface of a sphere such that the minimum distance between circles is maximized. It can be viewed as a generalization of the Thomson problem, in which the potential energy has the form E = sum_{i neq j} frac{1}{left mathbf{r}_{i} - mathbf{r}_{j} right ^{p}} in the limit as p , where ri is the position of the center of the ith circle on the sphere.