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33 votes
4 answers
3k views

Does there exist a shot in ideal pocket billiards?

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 ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
24 votes
2 answers
1k views

Billiard dynamics for multiple balls

I am interested to learn to what extent results on billiards in polygons have been extended to multiple balls. Assume the balls have equal radii and the same mass, the same initial speed, and all ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
7 votes
2 answers
740 views

How quickly will billiard trajectories cluster?

Suppose you launch $n$ point-particles on distinct reflecting nonperiodic billiard trajectories inside a convex polygon. Assume they all have the same speed. Define an $\epsilon$-cluster as a ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
5 votes
2 answers
996 views

Poincaré Recurrence and Dense Sets

This is kind of a spin-off of the question asked here. Take the interval $X:=[0,1]$ with $\mu$ being standard Lebesgue measure. Let $f$ be a measure preserving map $f:[0,1]\rightarrow [0,1]$. The ...
Alex R.'s user avatar
  • 4,952
5 votes
0 answers
166 views

Pocket billiards with balls in general position

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 ...
Joseph O'Rourke's user avatar
2 votes
0 answers
74 views

Nonintegrable classical dynamical systems and deterministic chaos

I'm trying to delineate a minimal (and informal) "taxonomy" for classical continuous dynamical systems that could be interested by the phenomenon of "chaos" - unfortunately the ...
Lo Scrondo's user avatar
0 votes
0 answers
64 views

Implications for a simple deterministic chaos definition

Among many others, one definition of deterministic chaos terms "chaotic" a classical dynamical system that satisfies the following three properties: sensitive dependence to initial ...
Lo Scrondo's user avatar