Related papers: Billiards, Checkers, and Quadratic Reciprocity
This paper investigates the dynamics of optical billiards, a generalization of classic billiards, where light rays travel within a refractive medium and reflect elastically at the boundary. Inspired by studies of acoustic modes in rapidly…
Statistical properties for the recurrence of particles in an oval billiard with a hole in the boundary are discussed. The hole is allowed to move in the boundary under two different types of motion: (i) counterclockwise periodic circulation…
The paper gives a review of very recent results related to the Poncelet Theorem, on the occasion of its bicentennial. We are telling the story of one of the most beautiful theorems of Geometry, recalling for the general mathematical…
Given a (simple) grid polygon $P$ in a grid of equilateral triangles, Defant and Jiradilok considered a billiards system where beams of light bounce around inside of $P$. We study the relationship between the perimeter…
We consider a billiard table rectangle. If a billiard ball is sent out from position F(1) at the angle of $\pi/4$, then the ball will rebound against the sides of the rectangle consecutively in points $F(2),F(3),...$. Let $n\geq5$ and…
Given an integer-valued matrix $A$ of dimension $\ell \times k$ and an integer-valued vector $b$ of dimension $\ell$, the Maker-Breaker $(A,b)$-game on a set of integers $X$ is the game where Maker and Breaker take turns claiming previously…
The density of states for a chaotic billiard with randomly distributed point-like scatterers is calculated, doubly averaged over the positions of the impurities and the shape of the billiard. Truncating the billiard Hamiltonian to a N x N…
We consider classical billiards on surfaces of constant curvature, where the charged billiard ball is exposed to a homogeneous, stationary magnetic field perpendicular to the surface. We establish sufficient conditions for hyperbolicity of…
We examine the quantum motion of two particles interacting through a contact force which are confined in a rectangular domain in two and three dimensions. When there is a difference in the mass scale of two particles, adiabatic separation…
We introduce a class of billiards with chaotic unidirectional flows (or non-chaotic unidirectional flows with "vortices") which go around a chaotic or non-chaotic "core", where orbits can change their orientation. Moreover, the…
We present an efficient method to solve scattering problems in two-dimensional open billiards with two leads and a complicated scattering region. The basic idea is to transform the scattering region to a rectangle, which will lead to…
In the game of Matching Pennies, Alice and Bob each hold a penny, and at every tick of the clock they simultaneously display the head or the tail sides of their coins. If they both display the same side, then Alice wins Bob's penny; if they…
An approach due to Wojtkovski [9], based on the Jacobi fields, is applied to study sets of 3-period orbits in billiards on hyperbolic plane and on two-dimensional sphere. It is found that the set of 3-period orbits in billiards on…
Many casinos routinely use mechanical card shuffling machines. We were asked to evaluate a new product, a shelf shuffler. This leads to new probability, new combinatorics and to some practical advice which was adopted by the manufacturer.…
The paper introduces the notions of an elliptic pair, an elliptic cycle and an elliptic list over a square free positive integer d. These concepts are related to the notions of amicable pairs of primes and aliquot cycles that were…
Dynamical properties are studied for escaping particles, injected through a hole in an oval billiard. The dynamics is considered for both static and periodically moving boundaries. For the static boundary, two different decays for the…
Parity games play a central role in model checking and satisfiability checking. Solving parity games is computationally expensive, among others due to the size of the games, which, for model checking problems, can easily contain $10^9$…
We study a class of elliptic billiards with a Keplerian potential inside, considering two cases: a reflective one, where the particle reflects elastically on the boundary, and a refractive one, where the particle can cross the billiard's…
In a recent paper of Blomer, Bourgain, Radziwi{\l}{\l} and Rudnick, the authors proved the existence of small gaps between eigenvalues of the Laplacian in a rectangular billiard with sides $\pi$ and $\pi/\sqrt\alpha$, i.e. numbers of the…
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…