Related papers: Symplectic Tiling Billiards, Planar Linkages, and …
We show that in a typical polygon the billiard map as well as its associated subshift obtained by coding orbits by the sequence of sides they visit are topologically weakly mixing.
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…
Given an exact symplectic map $T$ of a cylinder with a generating function $H$ satisfying the so-called negative twist condition, $H_{12}>0$, we study the locally maximizing orbits of $T$, that is, configurations which are local maxima of…
We describe a method to classify crystallographic tilings of the Euclidean and hyperbolic planes by tiles whose stabiliser group contains translation isometries or whose topology is not that of a closed disk. We tackle this problem from two…
We develop a Thurston-like theory to characterize geometrically finite rational maps, then apply it to study pinching and plumbing deformations of rational maps. We show that in certain conditions the pinching path converges uniformly and…
A fundamental way to study 3-manifolds is through the geometric lens, one of the most prominent geometries being the hyperbolic one. We focus on the computation of a complete hyperbolic structure on a connected orientable hyperbolic…
We identify the hyperbolic Kac Moody algebras for which there exists a Lagrangian of gravity, dilatons and $p$-forms which produces a billiard that can be identified with their fundamental Weyl chamber. Because of the invariance of the…
We study combinatorics of billiard partitions which arose recently in the description of periodic trajectories of ellipsoidal billiards in d-dimensional Euclidean and pseudo-Euclidean spaces. Such partitions uniquely codify the sets of…
The hexagon is the least-perimeter tile in the Euclidean plane. On hyperbolic surfaces, the isoperimetric problem differs for every given area. Cox conjectured that a regular $k$-gonal tile with 120-degree angles is isoperimetric for its…
The dynamic geometry of the family of 3-periodics in the Elliptic Billiard is mystifying. Besides conserving perimeter and the ratio of inradius-to-circumradius, it has a stationary point. Furthermore, its triangle centers sweep out…
A group-theoretical approach to the construction of quasiperiodic tilings of a Euclidean plane, possessing five-fold symmetry, is applied. Of the infinitely many of variants of quasiperiodic partitions of the plane, possessing the dihedral…
Symplectic billiards were introduced by Albers and Tabachnikov as billiards in strictly convex bounded domains of the plane with smooth boundary having a specific law of reflection. This paper proves a rigidity result for symplectic…
Given a closed hyperbolic surface $S$, let $\cQF$ denote the space of quasifuchsian hyperbolic metrics on $S\times\R$ and $\cGH_{-1}$ the space of maximal globally hyperbolic anti-de Sitter metrics on $S\times\R$. We describe natural maps…
This thesis is basically devoted to matroids -- fundamental structure of combinatorial optimization -- though some of our results concern simplicial complexes, or Euclidean spaces. We study old and new problems for these structures, with…
The famous conjecture of V.Ya.Ivrii (1978) says that {\it in every billiard with infinitely-smooth boundary in a Euclidean space the set of periodic orbits has measure zero}. In the present paper we study the complex algebraic version of…
Following a recent paper by Baryshnikov and Zharnitskii, we consider outer billiards in the plane possessing invariant curves consisting of periodic orbits. We prove the existence and abundance of such tables using tools from sub-Riemannian…
We give lower bound on the number of periodic billiard trajectories inside a generic smooth strictly convex closed surface in 3-space: for odd n, there are at least 2(n-1) such trajectories. We apply a topological approach based on the…
In this article we discuss pointwise spectral rigidity results for several billiard systems (e.g., Birkhoff billiards, symplectic billiards and $4$-th billiards), showing that a single value of Mather's $\beta$-function can determine…
We extend to the context of hyperbolic 3-manifolds with geodesic boundary Thurston's approach to hyperbolization by means of geometric triangulations. In particular, we introduce moduli for (partially) truncated hyperbolic tetrahedra, and…
This paper is the third in a series which explores a combinatorial method for generating lattice polygons in the plane. I call this method the plaid model. In this paper I prove the main result I had been aiming for since the beginning,…