Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
We show that the analogue of Hamilton's Ricci flow in the combinatorial setting produces solutions which converge exponentially fast to Thurston's circle packing on surfaces. As a consequence, a new proof of Thurston's existence of circle packing theorem is obtained. As another consequence, Ricci flow suggests a new algorithm to find circle packings.
Chow et al. (Wed,) studied this question.