We develop an analogue for sphere packing of the linear programming bounds for error-correcting codes, and use it to prove upper bounds for the density of sphere packings, which are the best bounds known at least for dimensions 4 through 36. We conjecture that our approach can be used to solve the sphere packing problem in dimensions 8 and 24.

We prove an asymptotic formula for the probability that, if one chooses a domino tiling of a large Aztec diamond at random according to the uniform distribution on such tilings, the tiling will contain a domino covering a given pair of adjacent lattice squares. This formula quantifies the effect of the diamond's boundary conditions on the behavior of typical tilings; in addition, it yields a new proof of the arctic circle theorem of Jockusch, Propp, and Shor. Our approach is to use the saddle point method to estimate certain weighted sums of squares of Krawtchouk polynomials (whose relevance to domino tilings is demonstrated elsewhere), and to combine these estimates with some exponential sum bounds to deduce our final result. This approach generalizes straightforwardly to the case in which the probability distribution on the set of tilings incorporates bias favoring horizontal over vertical tiles or vice versa. We also prove a fairly general large deviation estimate for domino tilings of simply-connected planar regions that implies that some of our results on Aztec diamonds apply to many other similar regions as well.

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We give some methods for computing equations for certain Shimura curves, natural maps between them, and special points on them. We then illustrate these methods by working out several examples in varying degrees of detail. For instance, we compute coordinates for all the rational CM points on the curves X * (1) associated with the quaternion algebras over Q ramified at {2, 3}, {2, 5}, {2, 7}, and {3, 5}. We conclude with a list of open questions that may point the way to further computational investigation of these curves.

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