Szego Seminar: "Rolling flows and their billiard limits"

Abstract: Billiard systems can be considered as models for systems in which rigid bodies interact through impulsive elastic forces, in other words, collision. It resembles a non-holonomic system in many ways. A no-slip billiard, in particular, is a system in which rolling balls exchange linear and angular momentum while colliding with the boundary. While ordinary billiard systems can be viewed as limit of geodesic flows, a similar conclusion is true for no-slip billiards. I will use some specific examples in R^n to demonstrate that no-slip billiards generally arise as limits of non-holonomic rolling systems.

Host: Nathan Wagner