4 research outputs found
Addendum to: Capillary floating and the billiard ball problem
We compare the results of our earlier paper on the floating in neutral
equilibrium at arbitrary orientation in the sense of Finn-Young with the
literature on its counterpart in the sense of Archimedes. We add a few remarks
of personal and social-historical character.Comment: This is an addendum to my article Capillary floating and the billiard
ball problem, Journal of Mathematical Fluid Mechanics 14 (2012), 363 -- 38
On the equilibria of finely discretized curves and surfaces
Our goal is to identify the type and number of static equilibrium points of
solids arising from fine, equidistant -discretrizations of smooth, convex
surfaces. We assume uniform gravity and a frictionless, horizontal, planar
support. We show that as approaches infinity these numbers fluctuate around
specific values which we call the imaginary equilibrium indices associated with
the approximated smooth surface. We derive simple formulae for these numbers in
terms of the principal curvatures and the radial distances of the equilibrium
points of the solid from its center of gravity. Our results are illustrated on
a discretized ellipsoid and match well the observations on natural pebble
surfaces.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figure
On recurrence and ergodicity for geodesic flows on noncompact periodic polygonal surfaces
We study the recurrence and ergodicity for the billiard on noncompact
polygonal surfaces with a free, cocompact action of or . In the
-periodic case, we establish criteria for recurrence. In the more difficult
-periodic case, we establish some general results. For a particular
family of -periodic polygonal surfaces, known in the physics literature
as the wind-tree model, assuming certain restrictions of geometric nature, we
obtain the ergodic decomposition of directional billiard dynamics for a dense,
countable set of directions. This is a consequence of our results on the
ergodicity of \ZZ-valued cocycles over irrational rotations.Comment: 48 pages, 12 figure