Related papers: Dodecahedral bowling
We consider the open stadium billiard, consisting of two semicircles joined by parallel straight sides with one hole situated somewhere on one of the sides. Due to the hyperbolic nature of the stadium billiard, the initial decay of…
We analyze the difference between ex ante and ex post equilibria in classical games played with the assistance of a nonlocal (quantum or no-signaling) resource. In physics, the playing of these games is known as performing bipartite…
Based on an effective model of a doped antiferromagnetic Mott insulator, we show that a doped hole will induce a dipole-like spin configuration in a spin ordered phase at low doping. The kinetic energy of doped holes is severely frustrated…
Archaeological mirrors from the Olmec civilization were analyzed in the context of bibliography produced in the last two decades. Photographs of its images are showed as a proof of its good quality. Some suggestions are made on its probable…
Self-collision of a non-relativistic classical point-like body, or particle, in the spacetime containing closed time-like curves (time-machine spacetime) is considered. A point-like body (particle) is an idealization of a small ideal…
We study the collision dynamics of a spinning cue ball approaching a static object ball with equal mass on a plane, common in billiards. While typical collisions in billiards are nearly perfectly elastic, with a restitution coefficient…
Astronomical observations were used as a marker for time and the Calendar from ancient times. A more subtle calibration of epochs is thrown up by an observation of the position of the solstices and equinoxes, because these points shift in…
In this paper we are interested in the motion of a ball inside a billiard table bounded by a particular smooth curve. This table belongs to a family of billiards which can all be drawn by a common process: the so-called gardener's string…
The aim of this work is to put together two novel concepts from the theory of integrable billiards: billiard ordered games and confocal billiard books. Billiard books appeared recently in the work of Fomenko's school, in particular of V.…
We study classical and quantum dynamics of a particle in a circular billiard with a straight cut. This system can be integrable, nonintegrable with soft chaos, or nonintegrable with hard chaos, as we vary the size of the cut. We use a…
We introduce a new equivalence relation on the set of all polygonal billiards. We say that two billiards (or polygons) are order equivalent if each of the billiards has an orbit whose footpoints are dense in the boundary and the two…
A beacon is a point-like object which can be enabled to exert a magnetic pull on other point-like objects in space. Those objects then move towards the beacon in a greedy fashion until they are either stuck at an obstacle or reach the…
There is only one type of tilings of the sphere by $12$ congruent pentagons. These tilings are isohedral.
We consider systems of "pinned balls," i.e., balls that have fixed positions and pseudo-velocities. Pseudo-velocities change according to the same rules as those for velocities of totally elastic collisions between moving balls. The times…
The rolling of a dynamically balanced ball on a horizontal rough table without slipping was described by Chaplygin using Abel quadratures. We discuss integrable discretizations and deformations of this nonholonomic system using the same…
Despite being one of the most recognisable buildings from ancient Rome, the Pantheon is poorly understood. While its architecture has been well studied, its function remains uncertain. This paper argues that both the design and the meaning…
On the 500th anniversary of Albrecht D\"urer's copperplate engraving Melencolia I, we invite readers to join in a time-honored "party game" that has attracted art historians and scientists for many years: guessing the nature and meaning of…
The notion of a rough two-dimensional (convex) body is introduced, and to each rough body there is assigned a measure on $\TTT^3$ describing billiard scattering on the body. The main result is characterization of the set of measures…
We are going to show that some variants of a puzzle called Pull in which the boxes have handles (i.e. we can only pull the boxes in certain directions) are NP-hard
Domineering is a combinatorial game played on a subset of a rectangular grid between two players. Each board position can be put into one of four outcome classes based on who the winner will be if both players play optimally. In this note,…