Covering compact metric spaces greedily

Abstract: A general greedy approach to construct coverings of compact metric spaces by metric balls is given and analyzed. The analysis is a continuous version of Chvatal's analysis of the greedy algorithm for the weighted set cover problem. The approach is demonstrated in an exemplary manner to construct efficient coverings of the n-dimensional sphere and n-dimensional Euclidean space to give short and transparent proofs of several best known bounds obtained from deterministic constructions in the literature on sphere coverings.