So my motivation here is actually because I want to evenly distribute plants in a green house and ideally I would like to maximize the distance between the plants and the walls. It seems like there is probably a way to do this. I suppose the only thing of interest here is the nearest neighbor distance, ie, this is what I would like to maximize.
This seemed like an simple enough question, so I did some googling. It seems like it might fall under the umbrella of circle packing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_packing. However, in my case, I don't have circles with a fixed radius so I'm unsure if this is applicable?
Does anybody have any suggestions? I suppose in the end it will have little affect on the efficiency or output of the greenhouse, but now I am curious. Thanks!