In physics, the poppy-seed bagel theorem concerns interacting particles (e.g., electrons) confined to a bounded surface (or body) when the particles repel each other pairwise with a magnitude that is proportional to the inverse distance between them raised to some positive power . In particular, this includes the Coulomb law observed in Electrostatics and Riesz potentials extensively studied in Potential theory. For such particles, a stable equilibrium state, which depends on the parameter , is attained when the associated potential energy of the system is minimal (the so-called generalized Thomson problem). For large numbers of points, these equilibrium configurations provide a discretization of which may or may not be nearly uniform with respect to the surface area (or volume) of . Th