The problem of finding congurations of points that are optimally-distributed on a set appears in a number
of guises including best-packing problems, coding theory, geometrical modeling, statistical sampling, radial
basis approximation and golf-ball design (i.e., where to put the dimples).
This talk will focus on classical and recent results concerning geometrical properties of N-point con-
gurations fxigNi
=1 on a compact metric set A (with metric m) that minimize a weighted Riesz s-energy
functional of the form