17 sep 2003, 4 may 2008

A GUI Simulator for General Planar Billiards

One of my students has desgined a nice GUI interface to simulate billiards with Matlab (which you can download here - search for billiards on my research homepage for more recent versions of the code). It can produce very nice figures for papers, but it cannot be used as a research tool. The underlying iteration algorithms used are not the wonderful ones in the WebBook, so this can handle very few iterations successfully. In particular, one can't produce the many million necessary to produce Poincare maps, study the stability of trajectories, examine the symbolic dynamics of itineraries, etc.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to

Please contact me if you interested in this project.
Mason A. Porter