Billiards in ellipses revisited (Q2095611)

The authors prove several, experimentally observed, properties for periodic billiard orbits within an ellipse. Among them, they consider the conservation law for the sum of cosines of the angles associated with orbits. Besides this main result other conserved quantities for a 1-parameter family of polygons associated with billiard orbits are proved using geometric methods as well as methods from complex analysis. The abstract provides in a clear and compact way the information contained and worked out in the paper. The references yield a good overview of the most important literature on the subject.