The apollonian octets and an inversive form of Krause's theorem

AbstractSuppose we are given three disjoint circles in the Euclidean plane with the property that none of them contains the other two. Then there are eight distinct circles tangent to the given three, and R.M. Krause has shown that a certain alternating sum of the curvatures of these eight circles must vanish. We express this result in an inversively invariant way and determine the extent to which it generalizes to other configurations of three given circles