Related papers: Dancing polygons, rolling balls and the Cartan-Eng…

When two populations of "particles" move in opposite directions, like oppositely charged colloids under an electric field or intersecting flows of pedestrians, they can move collectively, forming lanes along their direction of motion. The…

In a set of experiments, Couder et. al. demonstrate that an oscillating fluid bed may propagate a bouncing droplet through the guidance of the surface waves. We present a dynamical systems model, in the form of an iterative map, for a…

We explore relations between cyclic sequences determined by a quadratic difference relation, cyclotomic polynomials, Eulerian digraphs and walks in the plane. These walks correspond to closed paths for which at each step one must turn…

The point-line geometry known as a \textit{partial quadrangle} (introduced by Cameron in 1975) has the property that for every point/line non-incident pair $(P,\ell)$, there is at most one line through $P$ concurrent with $\ell$. So in…

In B{\'e}nard-Rayleigh convection we consider the pattern defect in orthogonal domain walls connecting a set of convective rolls with another set of rolls orthogonal to the first set. This is understood as an heteroclinic orbit of a…

We introduce the general polynomial algebras characterizing a class of higher order superintegrable systems that separate in Cartesian coordinates. The construction relies on underlying polynomial Heisenberg algebras and their defining…

Fix an integer n>=1. Suppose that a simple polygon is the union of n triangles whose vertices along the common boundary are arranged cyclically. How many sides can such a union -- to be called regular -- have at most? This gives OEIS…

We study two notions. One is that of spindle convexity. A set of circumradius not greater than one is spindle convex if, for any pair of its points, it contains every short circular arc of radius at least one, connecting them. The other…

There is a remarkable type of field of two-planes special to four dimensions known as an Engel distributions. They are the only stable regular distributions besides the contact, quasi-contact and line fields. If an arbitrary two-plane field…

We describe an algorithm for computing the separating common tangents of two simple polygons using linear time and only constant workspace. A tangent of a polygon is a line touching the polygon such that all of the polygon lies to the same…

Given a finite connected graph G, place a bin at each vertex. Two bins are called a pair if they share an edge of G. At discrete times, a ball is added to each pair of bins. In a pair of bins, one of the bins gets the ball with probability…

We consider $n$-dimensional discrete motions such that any two neighbouring positions correspond in a pure rotation ("rotating motions"). In the Study quadric model of Euclidean displacements these motions correspond to quadrilateral nets…

We study central configurations in the four body problem, i.e., configurations in which the forces on all the bodies point to a fixed, single point in space. The newly formulated pair-space formalism yields a set of vectorial equations that…

A previous work introduced pair space, which is spanned by the center of mass of a system and the relative positions (pair positions) of its constituent bodies. Here, I show that in the $N$-body Newtonian problem, a configuration that does…

We study first passage statistics of the Polya urn model. In this random process, the urn contains two types of balls. In each step, one ball is drawn randomly from the urn, and subsequently placed back into the urn together with an…

Nonlinear dynamics of a bouncing ball moving vertically in a gravitational field and colliding with a moving limiter is considered and the Poincare map, describing evolution from an impact to the next impact, is described. Displacement of…

A deflated polygon is a polygon with no visibility crossings. We answer a question posed by Devadoss et al. (2012) by presenting a polygon that cannot be deformed via continuous visibility-decreasing motion into a deflated polygon. We show…

The rolling of a dynamically balanced ball on a horizontal rough table without slipping was described by Chaplygin using Abel quadratures. We discuss integrable discretizations and deformations of this nonholonomic system using the same…

The motion of a rolling ball actuated by internal point masses that move inside the ball's frame of reference is considered. The equations of motion are derived by applying Euler-Poincar\'e's symmetry reduction method in concert with…

A flipturn is an operation that transforms a nonconvex simple polygon into another simple polygon, by rotating a concavity 180 degrees around the midpoint of its bounding convex hull edge. Joss and Shannon proved in 1973 that a sequence of…