Related papers: Billiards and the Five Distance Theorem II
A simple relation is developed between elastic collisions of freely-moving point particles in one dimension and a corresponding billiard system. For two particles with masses m_1 and m_2 on the half-line x>0 that approach an elastic barrier…
Mathematical billiards is much like the real game: a point mass, representing the ball, rolls in a straight line on a (perfectly friction-less) table, striking the sides according to the law of reflection. A billiard trajectory is then…
The billiard problem concerns a point particle moving freely in a region of the horizontal plane bounded by a closed curve $\Gamma$, and reflected at each impact with $\Gamma$. The region is called a `billiard', and the reflections are…
We offer some theorems, mainly of finiteness, for certain patterns in elliptical billiards, related to periodic trajectories. For instance, if two players hit a ball at a given position and with directions forming a fixed angle in…
We construct semi-infinite billiard domains which reverse the direction of most incoming particles. We prove that almost all particles will leave the open billiard domain after a finite number of reflections. Moreover, with high probability…
Recently were introduced physical billiards where a moving particle is a hard sphere rather than a point as in standard mathematical billiards. It has been shown that in the same billiard tables the physical billiards may have totally…
The billiard table is modeled as an $n$-dimensional box $[0,a_1]\times [0,a_2]\times \ldots \times [0,a_n] \subset \mathbb{R}^n$, with each side having real-valued lengths $a_i$ that are pairwise commensurable. A ball is launched from the…
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…
Given a domain or, more generally, a Riemannian manifold with boundary, a billiard is the motion of a particle when the field of force is absent. Trajectories of such a motion are geodesics inside the domain; and the particle reflects from…
The goal of this paper is an analysis of the geometry of billiards in ellipses, based on properties of confocal central conics. The extended sides of the billiards meet at points which are located on confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. They…
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 the class of projective billiards, which contains the usual billiards, we exhibit counter-examples to Ivrii's conjecture, which states that in any planar billiard with smooth boundary the set of periodic orbits has zero measure. The…
A class of non-compact billiards is introduced, namely the infinite step billiards, i.e., systems of a point particle moving freely in the domain $\Omega = \bigcup_{n\in\N} [n,n+1] \times [0,p_n]$, with elastic reflections on the boundary;…
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…
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…
We propose geometric tools that are suitable for studying the behavior of a billiard trajectory in a homogeneous force field. Two examples are considered: a vertical plane with an open top and with a parabolic or right angle boundary at the…
Let $(M,g)$ be a Riemannian manifold, $\Omega\subset M$ a domain with boundary $\Gamma$, and $\phi$ a smooth function such that $\phi|_\Omega > 0$, $\ph|_\Gamma = 0$, and $\nabla\phi|_\Gamma\ne 0$. We study the geodesic flow of the metric…
In standard (mathematical) billiards a point particle moves uniformly in a billiard table with elastic reflections off the boundary. We show that in transition from mathematical billiards to physical billiards, where a finite size hard…
We introduce the notion of a Billiard Array. This is an equilateral triangular array of one-dimensional subspaces of a vector space $V$, subject to several conditions that specify which sums are direct. We show that the Billiard Arrays on…
Given a strictly convex domain $\Omega$ in $\R^2$, there is a natural way to define a billiard map in it: a rectilinear path hitting the boundary reflects so that the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence. In this paper we…