title: Parabolic knapsack
body: <p>Lets say I have a parabola. Now I also have a bunch of sticks that are all of the same width (yes my drawing skills are amazing!).  How can I stack these sticks within the parabola such that I am minimizing the space it uses as much as possible?  I believe that this falls under the category of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_knapsack_problems" rel="noreferrer">Knapsack problems</a>,  but this Wikipedia page doesn't appear to bring me closer to a real world solution.  Is this a NP-Hard problem?   </p>
  
  <p>In this problem we are trying to minimize the amount of area consumed (eg: Integral),  which includes vertical area.</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/XqA0t.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></p>