Related papers: Polygonal billiards and "optical tori"
We consider the billiard map inside a polyhedron. We give a condition for the stability of the periodic trajectories. We apply this result to the case of the tetrahedron. We deduce the existence of an open set of tetrahedra which have a…
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…
We give lower bound on the number of periodic billiard trajectories inside a generic smooth strictly convex closed surface in 3-space: for odd n, there are at least 2(n-1) such trajectories. We apply a topological approach based on the…
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…
A periodic trajectory on a polygonal billiard table is stable if it persists under any sufficiently small perturbation of the table. It is a standard result that a periodic trajectory on an $n$-gon gives rise in a natural way to a closed…
We give topological lower bounds on the number of periodic and closed trajectories in strictly convex smooth billiards. We use variational reduction admitting a finite group of symmetries and apply topological approach based on equivariant…
In our recent paper, we studied periodic billiard trajectories in the regular pentagon and closed geodesic on the double pentagon, a translation surface of genus two. In particular, we made a number of conjectures concerning symbolic…
In this paper the problem of estimating the number of periodical billiard trajectories is considered. The main result is the theorem on Morse theory for periodical billiard trajectories.
We study polygonal billiards with one-sided vertical mirror scattered on a square billiard table. We associate trajectories of these kinds of billiards with double rotations and study orbit behavior and questions of complexity.
A correspondence between the orbits of a system of 2 complex, homogeneous, polynomial ordinary differential equations with real coefficients and those of a polygonal billiard is displayed. This correspondence is general, in the sense that…
A polygon is called rational if the angle between each pair of sides is a rational multiple of $\pi.$ The main theorem we will prove is Theorem 1: For rational polygons, periodic points of the billiard flow are dense in the phase space of…
We show that two-dimensional billiard systems are Turing complete, in the sense that the halting of any Turing machine with a given input is equivalent to a certain bounded trajectory in this system entering a specified open set. Billiards…
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…
We review some properties of periodic orbit families in polygonal billiards and discuss in particular a sum rule that they obey. In addition, we provide algorithms to determine periodic orbit families and present numerical results that shed…
We study the geometry of billiard orbits on rectangular billiards. A truncated billiard orbit induces a partition of the rectangle into polygons. We prove that thirteen is a sharp upper bound for the number of different areas of these…
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…
In this article, we study polygonal symplectic billiards. We provide new results, some of which are inspired by numerical investigations. In particular, we present several polygons for which all orbits are periodic. We demonstrate their…
We discuss the interplay between the piece-line regular and vertex-angle singular boundary effects, related to integrability and chaotic features in rational polygonal billiards. The approach to controversial issue of regular and irregular…
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 prove some recent experimental observations of D. Reznik concerning periodic billiard orbits in ellipses. For example, the sum of cosines of the angles of a periodic billiard polygon remains constant in the one-parameter family of such…