On the densest packing of polycylinders in any dimension

Using transversality and a dimension reduction argument, a result of A. Bezdek and W. Kuperberg is applied to polycylinders $\mathbb{D}^2\times \mathbb{R}^n$, showing that the optimal packing density is $\pi/\sqrt{12}$ in any dimension.Comment: Edited to reflect acknowledgements in the published versio

Development of intuitive rules: Evaluating the application of the dual-system framework to understanding children's intuitive reasoning

This is an author-created version of this article. The original source of publication is Psychon Bull Rev. 2006 Dec;13(6):935-53 The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com Published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF0321390

Geometric Permutations of Non-Overlapping Unit Balls Revisited

Given four congruent balls $A, B, C, D$ in $R^{d}$ that have disjoint interior and admit a line that intersects them in the order $ABCD$, we show that the distance between the centers of consecutive balls is smaller than the distance between the centers of $A$ and $D$. This allows us to give a new short proof that $n$ interior-disjoint congruent balls admit at most three geometric permutations, two if $n\ge 7$. We also make a conjecture that would imply that $n\geq 4$ such balls admit at most two geometric permutations, and show that if the conjecture is false, then there is a counter-example of a highly degenerate nature

Recurrence and higher ergodic properties for quenched random Lorentz tubes in dimension bigger than two

We consider the billiard dynamics in a non-compact set of R^d that is constructed as a bi-infinite chain of translated copies of the same d-dimensional polytope. A random configuration of semi-dispersing scatterers is placed in each copy. The ensemble of dynamical systems thus defined, one for each global realization of the scatterers, is called `quenched random Lorentz tube'. Under some fairly general conditions, we prove that every system in the ensemble is hyperbolic and almost every system is recurrent, ergodic, and enjoys some higher chaotic properties.Comment: Final version for J. Stat. Phys., 18 pages, 4 figure

Cutting sequences on translation surfaces

We analyze the cutting sequences associated to geodesic flow on a large class of translation surfaces, including Bouw-Moller surfaces. We give a combinatorial rule that relates a cutting sequence corresponding to a given trajectory, to the cutting sequence corresponding to the image of that trajectory under the parabolic element of the Veech group. This extends previous work for regular polygon surfaces to a larger class of translation surfaces. We find that the combinatorial rule is the same as for regular polygon surfaces in about half of the cases, and different in the other half.Comment: 30 pages, 19 figure