All Questions

There were at least two earlier MO questions about ideal pocket billiards. (Ideal: frictionless, perfectly elastic collisions.) Perfectly centered break of a perfectly aligned pool ball rack. Does ...

A quincunx or Galton board consists of staggered pegs from which ping-pong balls bounce and eventually display a binomial / normal distribution in catch-bins. I am wondering if the downward progress ...

Periodic orbits of a billiard ball bouncing in a square have been well-studied. I am seeking similar analysis of what is sometimes called a rough ball, one whose high friction causes it to pick up ...

I was surprised to learn from two Mathematica Demos by Enrique Zeleny that an elastic ball bouncing in a V or in a sinusoidal channel exhibits chaotic behavior:     (The Poincaré map ...

Assume you have one shot with the cue ball in pocket billiards (a.k.a. pool), with the game idealized in that no spin is placed on the cue ball in the initial shot, all collisions between billiard ...

I'm looking for software that will give billiard trajectories in arbitrary plane polygons. After much work I was able to produce this figure. (source) It was a good exercise, but at this point I ...