One of the greatest classes I ever took was "Cybernetics", taught by David Huffman ("the" Huffman). he started out the very first day talking about information theory, into sphere packing, and on to applications of sphere packing to communications.

I distinctly remember him concluded with something like "Sphere packing is hard, except in 11 dimenions" or something like that, but when I look at the history, I can't see how he knew that in 1994?