On the total surface area of potato packings

Abstract

We prove that if we fill without gaps a bag with infinitely many potatoes, in such a way that they touch each other in few points, then the total surface area of the potatoes must be infinite. In this context potatoes are measurable subsets of the Euclidean space, the bag is any open set of the same space. As we show, this result also holds in the general context of doubling (even locally) metric measure spaces satisfying Poincar\'e inequality, in particular in smooth Riemannian manifolds and even in some sub-Riemannian spaces.