Since version 8, Tableau offers a native circle-packing algorithm to produce bubble charts.

Of course, bubble charts are all but best practices when it comes to data visualizations, and dataviz expert Stephen Few even ranted against the software when they introduced this option.

However, despite not being great as a data visualization type, circle-packing is a technique with a long and interesting story. As it usually happens in math, circle-packing was born in ancient Grece, with the name of “Apollonius’ Tangency Problem”.

If you are interested in the mathematic side of circle-packing, here is a good resource, and here the research my uncle Giorgio did on Apollonian fractals using logo programming language.