Related papers: Dodecahedral bowling
For every quadrilateral sufficiently close to a rectangle, we shall show that it possess a periodic billiard path. This is an REU work done at ICERM in Summer 2012.
Dots-and-Boxes is a popular children's game whose winning strategies have been studied by Berlekamp, Conway, Guy, and others. In this article we consider two variations, Dots-and-Triangles and Dots-and-Polygons, both of which utilize the…
Black holes are fantastic laboratories to probe new physics. Both theoretically and experimentally, many new ideas are emerging to use them as tools for understanding better quantum gravity or classical gravity beyond general relativity. I…
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…
Puzzle solving is a difficult problem in its own right, even when the pieces are all square and build up a natural image. But what if these ideal conditions do not hold? One such application domain is archaeology, where restoring an…
We theoretically study the interaction of a heavy hole with nuclear spins in a quasi-two-dimensional III-V semiconductor quantum dot and the resulting dephasing of heavy-hole spin states. It has frequently been stated in the literature that…
In this paper, a theory of quandle rings is proposed for quandles analogous to the classical theory of group rings for groups, and interconnections between quandles and associated quandle rings are explored.
The Platonic solids is the name traditionally given to the five regular convex polyhedra, namely the tetradron, the octahedron, the cube, the icosahedron and the dodecahedron. Perhaps strongly boosted by the towering historical influence of…
The regular dodecahedron has a 2% smaller volume than the rhombic dodecahedron which is the Voronoi cell of a fcc packing. From this point of view it seems possible that the dodecahedral aspect which is the core of the so-called…
In "Playing Pool with $\pi$", Galperin invented an extraordinary method to learn the digits of $\pi$ by counting the collisions of billiard balls. Here I demonstrate an exact isomorphism between Galperin's bouncing billiards and Grover's…
In a recent paper, Junge and Palazuelos presented two two-player games exhibiting interesting properties. In their first game, entangled players can perform notably better than classical players. The quantitative gap between the two cases…
We investigate chaotic scattering on an attractive step potential with a quadrupolar deformation. The phase space features of the bound billiard are studied by using the notion of symmetry lines to find periodic orbits. We show that the…
In the eighth century BC something peculiar seems to happen on Sicily. The archaeological record starts to show the arrival of Greek material culture. By the fifth century BC the island is effectively 'Hellenised' and ancient historians…
Polygonalization of any smooth billiard boundary can be carried out in several ways. We show here that the semiclassical description depends on the polygonalization process and the results can be inequivalent. We also establish that…
A chain is an ordering of the integers 1 to n such that adjacent pairs have sums of a particular form, such as squares, cubes, triangular numbers, pentagonal numbers, or Fibonacci numbers. For example 4 1 2 3 5 form a Fibonacci chain while…
Space-filling building blocks of diverse shape permeate nature at all levels of organization, from atoms to honeycombs, and have proven useful in artificial systems, from molecular containers to clay bricks. But, despite the wide variety of…
Billiards in ellipses have a confocal ellipse or hyperbola as caustic. The goal of this paper is to prove that for each billiard of one type there exists an isometric counterpart of the other type. Isometry means here that the lengths of…
In a set of experiments, Couder et. al. demonstrate that an oscillating fluid bed may propagate a bouncing droplet through the guidance of the surface waves. We present a dynamical systems model, in the form of an iterative map, for a…
A ball polyhedron is a finite intersection of congruent balls in $\mathbb{R}^3$. These shapes arise in various contexts in discrete and convex geometry. We focus on Reuleaux polyhedra, the subclass of ball polyhedra whose centers and…
A strong coupling calculation of glueball masses based on the duality between supergravity and Yang-Mills theory is presented. Earlier work is extended to non-zero spin. Fluctuations in the gravitational metric lead to the 2^{++} state on…