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This paper investigates the rigidity of bordered polyhedral surfaces. Using the variational principle, we show that bordered polyhedral surfaces are determined by boundary value and discrete curvatures on the interior edges. As a corollary,…
N point particles move within a billiard table made of two circular cavities connected by a straight channel. The usual billiard dynamics is modified so that it remains deterministic, phase space volumes preserving and time reversal…
Light propagation on a two-dimensional curved surface embedded in a three-dimensional space has attracted increasing attention as an analog model of four-dimensional curved spacetime in laboratory. Despite recent developments in modern…
We give a simple proof that some iterated derived subdivision of every PL sphere is combinatorially equivalent to the boundary of a simplicial polytope, thereby resolving a problem of Billera (personal communication).
We obtain an upper bound of the number of collisions of any billiard trajectory in a polyhedral angle in terms of the minimal eigenvalue of a positive definite matrix which characterizes the angle. Elements of the matrix are scalar products…
We consider a billiard in the plane with periodic configuration of convex scatterers. This system is recurrent, in the sense that almost every orbit comes back arbitrarily close to the initial point. In this paper we study the time needed…
We show that every GL(2, R) orbit closure of translation surfaces is either a connected component of a stratum, the hyperelliptic locus, or consists entirely of surfaces whose Jacobians have extra endomorphisms. We use this result to give…
Ivrii's Conjecture states that in every billiard in Euclidean space the set of periodic orbits has measure zero. It implies that for every $k\geq2$ there are no k-reflective billiards, i.e., billiards having an open set of k-periodic…
Spiral waves in excitable media possess both wave-like and particle-like properties. When resonantly forced (forced at the spiral rotation frequency) spiral cores travel along straight trajectories, but may reflect from medium boundaries.…
Dynamical billiards, or the behavior of a particle traveling in a planar region $D$ undergoing elastic collisions with the boundary, has been extensively studied and is used to model many physical phenomena such as a Boltzmann gas. Of…
We consider systems of "pinned balls," i.e., balls that have fixed positions and pseudo-velocities. Pseudo-velocities change according to the same rules as those for velocities of totally elastic collisions between moving balls. The times…
Positive solutions of homogeneous Dirichlet boundary value problems or initial-value problems for certain elliptic or parabolic equations must be radially symmetric and monotone in the radial direction if just one of their level surfaces is…
We develop a framework for dealing with smooth approximations to billiards with corners in the two-dimensional setting. Let a polygonal trajectory in a billiard start and end up at the same billiard's corner point. We prove that smooth…
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 show that the boundary of any bounded strongly pseudoconvex complete circular domain in $\mathbb C^2$ must contain points that are exceptionally tangent to a projective image of the unit sphere.
We consider a multi-dimensional billiard system in an (n+1)-dimensional Euclidean space, the direct product of the "horizontal" hyperplane and the "vertical" line. The hypersurface that determines the system is assumed to be smooth and…
Recent experiments have shown that many species of microorganisms leave a solid surface at a fixed angle determined by steric interactions and near-field hydrodynamics. This angle is completely independent of the incoming angle. For several…
Billiards tables - a minimal model for particles moving in a confined region - are known to present classical (and quantum) different features according to their shape, ranging from strongly chaotic to integrable dynamics. Here we consider…
The purpose of this paper is to compare a classical non-holonomic system---a sphere rolling against the inner surface of a vertical cylinder under gravity---and a class of discrete dynamical systems known as no-slip billiards in similar…
The article studies a generalization of the elliptic billiard to the complex domain. We show that the billiard orbits also have caustics, and that the number of such caustics is bigger than for the real case. For example, for a given…