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Bouncing Around: The Language of Billiards in Polygons
Colloquium| Speaker: | Jayadev Athreya, University of Washington |
| Related Webpage: | https://faculty.washington.edu/jathreya/ |
| Location: | 1147 MSB |
| Start time: | Mon, Mar 10 2025, 3:10PM |
In how many ways can a billiard ball bounce around a table? I will describe some very new mathematics that helps answer this seemingly simple question when the billiard table is a regular polygon, based on joint work with Pascal Hubert and Serge Troubetzkoy. A big theme of this talk will be the fact that we in fact know very little about general mathematical billiards in polygons, even though they are very simple models of Newtonian mechanics.