Related papers: A Lighthouse Illumination Problem
In the current article we discuss an illumination problem proposed by Urrutia and Zaks. The focus is on configurations of finitely many two-sided mirrors in the plane together with a source of light placed at an arbitrary point. In this…
The illumination conjecture is a classical open problem in convex and discrete geometry, asserting that every compact convex body~$K$ in $\mathbb R^n$ can be illuminated by a set of no more than $2^n$ points. If $K$ has smooth boundary, it…
The Illumination Problem may be phrased as the problem of covering a convex body in Euclidean $n$-space by a minimum number of translates of its interior. By a probabilistic argument, we show that, arbitrarily close to the Euclidean ball,…
This paper concerns the number of lattice points in a circle.
A point p is 1-well illuminated by a set F of n point lights if p lies in the interior of the convex hull of F. This concept corresponds to triangle-guarding or well-covering. In this paper we consider the illumination range of the light…
At a first glance, the problem of illuminating the boundary of a convex body by external light sources and the problem of covering a convex body by its smaller positive homothetic copies appear to be quite different. They are in fact two…
Galaxies are lighthouses that sit atop peaks in the density field. There is good observational evidence that these lighthouses do not provide a uniform description of the distribution of dark matter.
The main goal of the paper is to solve some problems about shadow for the sphere generalized on the case of the ellipsoid. Here, the essence of the problem is to find the the minimal number of non-overlapping balls with centers on the…
We motivate then formulate a novel variant of the near-field reflector problem and call it the near-field reflector problem with spatial restrictions. Let $O$ be an anisotropic point source of light and assume that we are given a bounded…
Illumination complexes are examples of 'flat polyhedral complexes' which arise if several copies of a convex polyhedron (convex body) Q are glued together along some of their common faces (closed convex subsets of their boundaries). A…
Occultation and microlensing are different limits of the same phenomena of one body passing in front of another body. We derive a general exact analytic expression which describes both microlensing and occultation in the case of spherical…
We study the well-known Ptolemy-Alhazen problem on reflection of light at the surface of a spherical mirror in the case when the source of light is very far from the mirror.
The equation in the title describes the number of bright images of a point source under lensing by an elliptic object with isothermal density. We prove that this equation has at most 6 solutions. Any number of solutions from 1 to 6 can…
The illumination conjecture asserts that any convex body in $n$-dimensional Euclidean space can be illuminated by at most $2^n$ external light sources or parallel beams of light. Despite recent progress on the illumination conjecture, it…
Given a set of $n$ nonoverlapping circular discs on a plane, we aim to determine possible positions of points (referred to as cameras) that could fully illuminate all the circular discs' boundaries. This work presents a geometric approach…
Omnidirectional light concentration remains an unsolved problem despite such important practical applications as design of efficient mobile photovoltaic cells. Optical black hole designs developed recently offer partial solution to this…
In this paper, we propose a class of elementary plane geometry problems closely related to the title of this paper. Here, a circle is the 1-dimensional curve bounding a disk. For any nonnegative integer, a circle is called $n$-enclosing if…
The aim of this paper is to generalize Apollonius' problem. The problem is to construct a circle that is tangent to three given circles in a plane. We find the maximum possible number of solution circles in the case of more than the three…
In a recent paper, Hawkins (1997) argues on the basis of statistical studies of double-image gravitational lenses and lens candidates that a large population of dark lenses exists and that these outnumber galaxies with more normal…
A point source of light is placed inside an oval. The $n$-th caustic by reflection is the envelope of the light rays emanating from the light source after $n$ reflections off the curve. We show that each of these caustics, for a generic…