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We introduce a new dynamical system: the wind-tree tiling billiards. This system studies trajectories of a ray in Euclidean space which has a negative refractive index when encountering rectangular obstacles located at lattice points. We…
We study periodic linear trajectories in the double pentagon and periodic billiard trajectories in the regular pentagon.
A $triangulation$ is an embedding of a graph on surfaces where every face has length three. In this article, we show the existence of contractible Hamiltonian cycle in triangulated maps of which minimum degree is four.
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…
We study the spectral rigidity problem for Sinai billiards with finite horizon, specifically asking whether the geometry of the billiard table can be recovered from the lengths of its (marked) periodic trajectories. To address this, we…
We study the dynamics of a piecewise map defined on the set of three pairwise nonparallel, nonconcurrent lines in $\mathbb{R}^2$. The geometric map of study may be analogized to the billiard map with a different reflection rule so that each…
Given two triangulations of a convex polygon, computing the minimum number of flips required to transform one to the other is a long-standing open problem. It is not known whether the problem is in P or NP-complete. We prove that two…
Let $P$ be an orthogonal polygon. Consider a sliding camera that travels back and forth along an orthogonal line segment $s\in P$ as its \emph{trajectory}. The camera can see a point $p\in P$ if there exists a point $q\in s$ such that $pq$…
The classical Birkhoff conjecture claims that the boundary of a strictly convex integrable billiard table is necessarily an ellipse (or a circle as a special case). In this article we prove a complete local version of this conjecture: a…
Triangular peg solitaire is a well-known one-person game or puzzle. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. We investigate whether the game can end in a dramatic fashion, with one peg sweeping all remaining…
Consider a line segment placed on a two-dimensional grid of rectangular tiles. This paper addresses the relationship between the length of the segment and the number of tiles it visits (i.e. has intersection with). The square grid is also…
We study geometry of confocal quadrics in pseudo-Euclidean spaces of an arbitrary dimension $d$ and any signature, and related billiard dynamics. The goal is to give a complete description of periodic billiard trajectories within…
We study the simplicial volume of manifolds obtained from Davis' reflection group trick, the goal being characterizing those having positive simplicial volume. In particular, we focus on checking whether manifolds in this class with nonzero…
We introduce TriSearch, a reinforcement learning framework for optimizing objectives over triangulations of a polytope via bistellar flips. The key idea is a circuit-supported subtriangulation action representation: feasible flips are…
We consider billiards obtained by removing three strictly convex obstacles satisfying the non-eclipse condition on the plane. The restriction of the dynamics to the set of non-escaping orbits is conjugated to a subshift on three symbols…
We investigate the transmission and reflection survival probabilities for the chaotic stadium billiard with two holes placed asymmetrically. Classically, these distributions are shown to have algebraic or exponential decays depending on the…
The goal of this paper is an analysis of the geometry of billiards in ellipses, based on properties of confocal central conics. The extended sides of the billiards meet at points which are located on confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. They…
We introduce and prove numerous new results about the orbits of the $T$-fractal billiard. Specifically, in Section 3, we give a variety of sufficient conditions for the existence of a sequence of compatible periodic orbits. In Section 4, we…
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 perform fractal analysis on a closed classical hard-wall billiard, the circular billiard with a straight cut, assuming there are two openings on the boundary. We use a two-dimensional set of initial conditions that produce all possible…