“Maximum Overhang”, Mike Paterson, Yuval Peres, Mikkel Thorup, Peter Winkler, Uri Zwick2007-07-01 (math; backlinks)⁠:

How far can a stack of n identical blocks be made to hang over the edge of a table? The question dates back to at least the middle of the 19^th century and the answer to it was widely believed to be of order log n.

Recently, Paterson & Zwick2007 constructed n-block stacks with overhangs of order n^1⁄3, exponentially better than previously thought possible.

We show here that order n^1⁄3 is indeed the best possible, resolving the long-standing overhang problem up to a constant factor.

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