A lattice is called well-rounded if its minimal vectors span the corresponding Euclidean space. In this paper we study the similarity classes of well-rounded sublattices of ${ \mathbb Z}^2$. We relate the set of all such similarity classes to a subset of primitive Pythagorean triples, and prove that it has structure of a noncommutative infinitely generated monoid. We discuss the structure of a given similarity class, and define a zeta function corresponding to each similarity class. We relate it to Dedekind zeta of ${ \mathbb Z}[i]$, and investigate the growth of some related Dirichlet series, which reflect on the distribution of well-rounded lattices. Finally, we construct a sequence of similarity classes of well-rounded sublattices of ${ \mathbb Z}^2$, which gives good circle packing density and converges to the hexagonal lattice as fast as possible with respect to a natural metric we define.
Categories: math.NT