Protecting billiard balls from collisions

DOI10.1007/S40598-019-00131-WMaRDI QIDQ778123zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors K. Burdzy, Jayadev S. Athreya

Publication date 30 June 2020

Published in Arnold Mathematical Journal (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.02780

zbMATH Keywords

billiardscollisionsErdős-Szekeres theorem

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Erd?s problems and related topics of discrete geometry (52C10) 2-person games (91A05) Games involving graphs (91A43)

Abstract: We present a game inspired by research on the possible number of billiard ball collisions in the whole Euclidean space. One player tries to place $n$ static "balls" with zero radius (i.e., points) in a way that will minimize the total number of possible collisions caused by the cue ball. The other player tries to find initial conditions for the cue ball to maximize the number of collisions. The value of the game is $sqrtn$ (up to constants). The lower bound is based on the ErdH{o}s-Szekeres Theorem. The upper bound may be considered a generalization of the ErdH{o}s-Szekeres Theorem.

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Cites work

• A geometric approach to semi-dispersing billiards (Survey)
• A lower bound for the number of elastic collisions
• A Simple Proof of a Theorem of Erdös and Szekeres^*
• An Alternative Proof of a Theorem of Erdos and Szekeres
• Collisions in semi-dispersing billiard on Riemannian manifold
• Finite-range repulsive systems of finitely many particles
• Finiteness of the number of collisions in a hard sphere particle system in all space, II: Arbitrary diameters and masses
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1584898 (Why is no real title available?)
• On the number of collisions in a hard sphere particle system in all space
• Unfoldings and global bounds on the number of collisions for generalized semi-dispersing billiards
• Uniform estimates on the number of collisions in semi-dispersing billiards
• Vladimir I. Arnold - Collected Works

Cited in

(2)

• Billiard balls count
• On pinned billiard balls and foldings

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