Related papers: Caustics of Poncelet polygons and classical extrem…
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 study the deep interplay between geometry of quadrics in d-dimensional space and the dynamics of related integrable billiard systems. Various generalizations of Poncelet theorem are reviewed. The corresponding analytic conditions of…
The paper gives a review of very recent results related to the Poncelet Theorem, on the occasion of its bicentennial. We are telling the story of one of the most beautiful theorems of Geometry, recalling for the general mathematical…
We introduce a new class of billiard systems in the plane, with boundaries formed by finitely many arcs of confocal conics such that they contain some reflex angles. Fundamental dynamical, topological, geometric, and arithmetic properties…
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…
Poncelet maps are circle maps constructed geometrically for a pair of nested ellipses; they are related to the classic billiard map on an elliptical domain when the orbit has an elliptical caustic. Here we show how the rotation number of…
Let $q \ge 3$ be a period. There are at least two $(1,q)$-periodic trajectories inside any smooth strictly convex billiard table, and all of them have the same length when the table is an ellipse or a circle. We quantify the chaotic…
Billiards are flat cavities where a particle is free to move between elastic collisions with the boundary. In chaos theory these systems are simple prototypes, their conservative dynamics of a billiard may vary from regular to chaotic,…
The classical dynamics of the isotropic two-dimensional harmonic oscillator confined by an elliptic hard wall is discussed. The interplay between the harmonic potential with circular symmetry and the boundary with elliptical symmetry does…
The notions of reflection from outside, reflection from inside and signature of a billiard trajectory within a quadric are introduced. Cayley-type conditions for periodical trajectories for the billiard in the region bounded by $k$ quadrics…
We consider the Boltzmann system corresponding to the motion of a billiard with a linear boundary under the influence of a gravitational field. We derive analytic conditions of Cayley's type for periodicity of its trajectories and provide…
Starting from billiard partitions which arose recently in the description of periodic trajectories of ellipsoidal billiards in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space, we introduce a new type of separable integer partition classes, called type B.…
In this paper we prove two asymptotic estimates for pairs of closed trajectories for open billiards similar to those established by Pollicott and Sharp for closed geodesics on negatively curved compact surfaces. The first of these estimates…
We show that the complexity of the billiard in a typical polygon grows cubically and the number of saddle connections grows quadratically along certain subsequences. It is known that the set of points whose first n-bounces hits the same…
We introduce and study several random combinatorial billiard trajectories. Such a system, which depends on a fixed parameter $p\in(0,1)$, models a beam of light that travels in a Euclidean space, occasionally randomly reflecting off of a…
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…
The periodic orbits of the strongly chaotic cardioid billiard are studied by introducing a binary symbolic dynamics. The corresponding partition is mapped to a topological well-ordered symbol plane. In the symbol plane the pruning front is…
We provide lower bounds on the number of periodic Finsler billiard trajectories inside a quadratically convex smooth closed hypersurface $M$ in a $d$-dimensional Finsler space with possibly irreversible Finsler metric. An example of such a…
We study absolutely periodic points and trajectories of Hamiltonian systems. Our main result is a necessary and sufficient for a Hamiltonian system to have the following property: if there exists one absolutely periodic trajectory then all…
The thirty years old programme of Griffiths and Harris of understanding higher-dimensional analogues of Poncelet-type problems and synthetic approach to higher genera addition theorems has been settled and completed in this paper. Starting…