Related papers: Trees and flowers on a billiard table
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…
In this paper, we consider the set of all domino tilings of a cubiculated region. The primary question we explore is: How can we move from one tiling to another? Tiling spaces can be viewed as spaces of subgraphs of a fixed graph with a…
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…
Given a random map (T_1, T_2, T_3, T_4, p_1, p_2, p_3, p_4), we define a random billiard map on a surface of constant curvature (Euclidean plane, hyperbolic plane, or the sphere). The Liouville measure is invariant for this billiard map.…
The periodic tiling conjecture asserts that any finite subset of a lattice $\mathbb{Z}^d$ which tiles that lattice by translations, in fact tiles periodically. In this work we disprove this conjecture for sufficiently large $d$, which also…
A proof is sketched of the Polynomial Conjecture of the author (circulated as preprint "Brick Tiling and Monotone Boolean Functions", available at the http://www.math.ufl.edu/~squash/tilingstuff.html url) which says that the family of…
The Poincar\'e problem is a model of two-dimensional internal waves in stable-stratified fluid. The chess billiard flow, a variation of a typical billiard flow, drives the formation behind and describes the evolution of these internal…
We consider the free motion of a point particle inside a circular billiard with periodically moving boundary, with the assumption that the collisions of the particle with the boundary are elastic so that the energy of the particle is not…
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…
Billiard models of single particles moving freely in two-dimensional regions enclosed by hard walls, have long provided ideal toy models for the investigation of dynamical systems and chaos. Recently, billiards with (semi-)permeable walls…
We analyze the dynamics of a valence electron of the buckminsterfullerene molecule (C60) subjected to a circularly polarized laser field by modeling it with the motion of a classical particle in an annular billiard. We show that the phase…
The Collatz Conjecture's connection to dynamical systems opens it to a variety of techniques aimed at recurrence and density results. First, we turn to density results and strengthen the result of Terras through finding a strict rate of…
Dan Reznik found, by computer experimentation, a number of conserved quantities associated with periodic billiard trajectories in ellipses. We prove some of his observations using a non-standard generating function for the billiard ball…
The connected configuration space of a so called cylindric billiard system is a flat torus minus finitely many spherical cylinders. The dynamical system describes the uniform motion of a point particle in this configuration space with…
A periodic behavior is a well observed phenomena in biological and economical systems. We show that evolutionary games on graphs with imitation dynamics can display periodic behavior for an arbitrary choice of game theoretical parameters…
We give a proof for $(2n + 1,n)$ and $(2n, n-1)$-periodic Ivrii's conjecture for planar outer billiards. We also give new simple geometric proofs for the 3 and 4-periodic cases for outer and symplectic billiards, and generalize for higher…
We investigate the rotation sets of billiards on the $m$-dimensional torus with one small convex obstacle and in the square with one small convex obstacle. In the first case the displacement function, whose averages we consider, measures…
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…
In this text we study billiards on ovals and investigate some consequences of a rotational symmetry of the boundary on the dynamics. As it simplifies some calculations, the symmetry helps to obtain the results. We focus on periodic orbits…
We study geometry of confocal quadrics in pseudo-Euclidean spaces of an arbitrary dimension $d$ and any signature, and related billiard dynamics. The goal is to give a complete description of periodic billiard trajectories within…