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Does every triangle admit a periodic billiard path?
by
Patrick Hooper
SUNY Stony Brook and Yale University
Coauthors: Rich Schwartz
I will discuss the current state of this open question. It has long been known that every acute triangle admits a periodic billiard path. The story is somewhat similar for right triangles. For obtuse triangles, the question seems more difficult. Often however, periodic billiard paths can be found by computer experimentation. Motivated by these experiments, Rich Schwartz has shown every triangle with angles less that 100 degrees admits a periodic billiard path. I will discuss this result and obstacles to extending this result further. The program we are developing is available on Rich Schwartz's website: http://www.math.umd.edu/~res/
Date received: November 6, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by the author(s). The author(s) of this work and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Topology Atlas. Document # capf-11.