  Random packings of objects of a particular shape are ubiquitous in science
and engineering. However, such jammed matter states have eluded any systematic
theoretical treatment due to the strong positional and orientational
correlations involved. In recent years progress on a fundamental description of
jammed matter could be made by starting from a constant volume ensemble in the
spirit of conventional statistical mechanics. Recent work has shown that this
approach, first introduced by S. F. Edwards more than two decades ago, can be
cast into a predictive framework to calculate the packing fractions of both
spherical and non-spherical particles.
