title: Nesting maximum amount of shapes on a surface
body: <p>In industry, there is often a problem where you need to calculate the most efficient use of material, be it fabric, wood, metal etc. So the starting point is X amount of shapes of given dimensions, made out of polygons and/or curved lines, and target is another polygon of given dimensions. </p>
  
  <p>I assume many of the current CAM suites implement this, but having no experience using them or of their internals, what kind of computational algorithm is used to find the most efficient use of space? Can someone point me to a book or other reference that discusses this topic?</p>