A Correspondence between Billiards and Geodesics
Abstract
From a geometric viewpoint, billiard trajectories and geodesics are related by mutual approximation results. In one direction, it is known that every geodesic curve in the boundary of a smooth convex body can be approximated by a sequence of billiard trajectories inside of it. We establish the other direction by proving that, for Riemannian billiard tables (under mild assumptions), there exists a family of fold-type surfaces such that every sequence of geodesic segments on these surfaces has a subsequence that converges to a billiard trajectory in the table. In particular, this is true for convex Euclidean tables. We also describe a more general class of tables to which this result applies and present explicit non-Euclidean examples.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.02938,
title = {A Correspondence between Billiards and Geodesics},
author = {Daniele Giannetto},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.02938},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
19 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Nonlinearity