Related papers: From circular paths to elliptic orbits: A geometri…

The hodograph of the Kepler-Coulomb problem, that is, the path traced by its velocity vector, is shown to be a circle and then it is used to investigate other properties of the motion. We obtain the configuration space orbits of the problem…

We describe a geometrical method for tracing a planet's orbit using its velocity hodograph, that is, the path of the planet's velocity. The method requires only a straight edge, a compass, and the help of the hodograph. We also obtain…

The hodograph of a non-relativistic particle motion in Euclidean space is the curve described by its momentum vector. For a general central orbit problem the hodograph is the inverse of the pedal curve of the orbit, (i.e. its polar…

Hodographs for the Kepler problem are circles. This fact, known since almost two centuries ago, still provides the simplest path to derive the Kepler first law. Through Feynman `lost lecture', this derivation has now reached to a wider…

The law of centripetal force governing the motion of celestial bodies in eccentric conic sections, has been established and thoroughly investigated by Sir Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica. Yet its profound implications on the…

In this contribution it is shown that the path from Kepler's results to Newtonian motion can be remarkably short and simple. Following this path we also give a straight forward computation of the direction angle of Hamilton's Hodograph.…

Relativistic Coulomb systems are studied in velocity space, prompted by the fact that the study of Newtonian Kepler/Coulomb systems in velocity space provides a method much simpler (and more elegant) than the familiar analytic solutions in…

A small variation of the circular shape of the hodograph theorem states that for every elliptical solution of the two-body problem, it is possible to find an appropriate inertial frame such that the speed of the bodies is constant. We use…

It is argued that, for motion in a central force field, polar reciprocals of trajectories are an elegant alternative to hodographs. The principal advantage of polar reciprocals is that the transformation from a trajectory to its polar…

Hamilton's hodograph method geometrizes, in a simple and very elegant way, in velocity space, the full dynamics of classical particles in $1/r$ potentials. States of given energy and angular momentum are represented by circular hodographs…

The Kepler map was derived by Petrosky (1986) and Chirikov and Vecheslavov (1986) as a tool for description of the long-term chaotic orbital behaviour of the comets in nearly parabolic motion. It is a two-dimensional area-preserving map,…

This work addresses the Hamiltonian dynamics of the Kepler problem in a deformed phase space, by considering the equatorial orbit. The recursion operators are constructed and used to compute the integrals of motion. The same investigation…

We examine the equant model for the motion of planets, which has been the starting point of Kepler's investigations before he modified it because of Mars observations. We show that, up to first order in eccentricity, this model implies for…

Starting from the vortex filament flow introduced in 1906 by Da Rios, there is a hierarchy of commuting geometric flows on space curves. The traditional approach relates those flows to the nonlinear Schr\"odinger hierarchy satisfied by the…

It was discovered by Gordon in 1977 that Keplerian ellipses in the plane are minimizers of the Lagrangian action and spectrally stable as periodic points of the associated Hamiltonian flow. The aim of this paper is to give a homotopy…

In the past, Kepler painstakingly derived laws of planetary motion using difficult to understand and hard to follow techniques. In 1843 William Hamilton created and described the quaternions, which extend the complex numbers and can easily…

Geometric algebra was initiated by W.K. Clifford over 130 years ago. It unifies all branches of physics, and has found rich applications in robotics, signal processing, ray tracing, virtual reality, computer vision, vector field processing,…

Due to Poinsot's theorem, the motion of a rigid body about a fixed point is represented as rolling without slipping of the moving hodograph of the angular velocity over the fixed one. If the moving hodograph is a closed curve, visualization…

Although the differential calculus was invented by Newton, Kepler established his famous laws 70 years earlier by using the same idea, namely to find a path in a nonuniform field of force by small steps. It is generally not known that…

In his fondamental "Essay on the 3-body problem", Lagrange, well before Jacobi's "reduction of the node", carries out the first complete reduction of symetries. Discovering the so-called homographic motions, he shows that they necessarily…