Related papers: Dancing polygons, rolling balls and the Cartan-Eng…
Lagrangian systems with nonholonomic constraints may be considered as singular differential equations defined by some constraints and some multipliers. The geometry, solutions, symmetries and constants of motion of such equations are…
Matched pairs of Lie groupoids and Lie algebroids are studied. Discrete Euler-Lagrange equations are written for the matched pairs of Lie groupoids. As such, a geometric framework to analyse a discrete system by decomposing it into two…
A double-normal pair of a finite set $S$ of points from Euclidean space is a pair of points $\{p,q\}$ from $S$ such that $S$ lies in the closed strip bounded by the hyperplanes through $p$ and $q$ that are perpendicular to $pq$. A…
An algorithm is presented for numerical computation of choreographies in the plane in a Newtonian potential and on the sphere in a cotangent potential. It is based on stereographic projection, approximation by trigonometric polynomials, and…
A beer bottle or soda can on a table, when slightly tipped and released, falls to an upright position and then rocks up to a somewhat opposite tilt. Superficially this rocking motion involves a collision when the flat circular base of the…
In this work we introduce a planar restricted four-body problem where a massless particle moves under the gravitational influence due to three bodies following the eight figure choreography, and we explore some symmetric periodic orbits of…
We recall the directed graph of _juggling states_, closed walks within which give juggling patterns, as studied by Ron Graham in [w/Chung, w/Butler]. Various random walks in this graph have been studied before by several authors, and their…
There is a natural generalization of domino tilings to tilings of a polygon by hexagons, or, dually, configurations of oriented curves that meet in triples. We show exactly when two such tilings can be connected by a series of moves…
Discrete dynamical models of walking droplets ("walkers") have allowed swift numerical experiments revealing heretofore unobserved quantum statistics and related behaviors in a classical hydrodynamic system. We present evidence that one…
We describe an experiment dedicated to the study of the trajectories of a ball bouncing randomly on a vibrating plate. The system was originally used, considering a sinusoidal vibration, to illustrate period doubling and the route to chaos.…
The altenating knots, links and twists projected on the S_2 sphere are identified with the phase Space of a Hamiltonian dynamic system of one degree of freedom. The saddles of the system correspond to the crossing points, the edges, to the…
We study hexagon patterns in non-Boussinesq convection of a thin rotating layer of water. For realistic parameters and boundary conditions we identify various linear instabilities of the pattern. We focus on the dynamics arising from an…
I introduce an extended configuration space for classical mechanical systems, called pair-space, which is spanned by the relative positions of all the pairs of bodies. To overcome the non-independence of this basis, one adds to the…
Rectangulations are decompositions of a square into finitely many axis-aligned rectangles. We describe realizations of $(n-1)$-dimensional polytopes associated with two combinatorial families of rectangulations composed of $n$ rectangles.…
The pentagram map is a discrete dynamical system on planar polygons. By definition, the image of a polygon $P$ under the pentagram map is the polygon $P'$ whose vertices are the intersection points of consecutive shortest diagonals of $P$.…
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…
The Lagrangian statistics of relative dispersion in fully developed turbulence is numerically investigated. A scaling range spanning many decades is achieved by generating a synthetic velocity field with prescribed Eulerian statistical…
When the Rayleigh number is low, Rayleigh-B\'enard convection in a nonrotating spherical shell with central gravity has symmetric solutions in terms of three-dimensional discrete rotation. All the known patterns with the regular polyhedral…
We study the geometry of Engel structures, which are 2-plane fields on 4-manifolds satisfying a generic condition, that are compatible with other geometric structures. A complex Engel structure is an Engel 2-plane field on a complex surface…
A tanglegram consists of two rooted binary trees and a perfect matching between their leaves, and a planar tanglegram is one that admits a layout with no crossings. We show that the problem of generating planar tanglegrams uniformly at…