“Let’s play symplectic billiards!”
Tuesday 15 April 2025 h. 14:30 - Room 2BC30 - Alessandra Nardi (Padova, Dip. Mat.)
Abstract
A mathematical billiard is a dynamical system describing the motion of a mass point (the billiard ball) inside a planar region (the billiard table). The ball moves with constant speed and without friction, following a rectilinear path. The straightforwardness and versatility of this model have made mathematical billiards an object of interest in many different contexts. Indeed, depending on the shape of the billiard table, they show a wide range of dynamical behaviors such as integrability, regularity, and chaoticity. Integrability remains an unanswered property, and the celebrated Birkhoff conjecture remains open. In 2018, P. Albers and S. Tabachnikov introduced a new interesting class of billiards, called symplectic billiards, as a natural variation of Birkhoff billiards with the inner area – instead of the length – as generating function. This talk will present the symplectic billiards dynamics and focus on recent rigidity results.
Talk based on joint works with L. Baracco and O. Bernardi.
The video of the seminar will appear shortly afterwards in this Mediaspace channel.
