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QUANTIZE D COLU MNS

Unfolding the Mysteries of Polygonal Billiards

By D A V I D S . R I C H E S O N

February 15, 2024

The surprisingly subtle geometry of a familiar game shows how quickly math gets complicated.

James O’Brien for Quanta Magazine

 I
n Disney’s 1959 �lm Donald in Mathmagic Land, Donald Duck, inspired by the narrator’s
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descriptions of the geometry of billiards, energetically strikes the cue ball, sending it ricocheting
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around the table before it �nally hits the intended balls. Donald asks, “How do you like that for
mathematics?”

Because rectangular billiard tables have four walls meeting at right angles, billiard trajectories like
Donald’s are predictable and well understood — even if they’re di�cult to carry out in practice.
However, research mathematicians still cannot answer basic questions about the possible trajectories
of billiard balls on tables in the shape of other polygons (shapes with �at sides). Even triangles, the
simplest of polygons, still hold mysteries.

Is it always possible to hit a ball so that it returns to its starting point traveling in the same direction,
creating a so-called periodic orbit? Nobody knows. For other, more complicated shapes, it’s unknown
whether it’s possible to hit the ball from any point on the table to any other point on the table.

Although these questions seem to �t snugly within the con�nes of geometry as it’s taught in high
school, attempts to solve them have required some of the world’s foremost mathematicians to bring in
ideas from disparate �elds including dynamical systems, topology and di�erential geometry. As with
any great mathematics problem, work on these problems has created new mathematics and has fed
back into and advanced knowledge in those other �elds. Yet despite all this e�ort, and the insight
modern computers have brought to bear, these seemingly straightforward problems stubbornly resist
resolution.

Here’s what mathematicians have learned about billiards since Donald Duck’s epically tangled shot.

They typically assume that their billiard ball is an in�nitely small, dimensionless point and that it
bounces o� the walls with perfect symmetry, departing at the same angle as it arrives, as seen below.

Without friction, the ball travels inde�nitely unless it reaches a corner, which stops the ball like a
pocket. The reason billiards is so di�cult to analyze mathematically is that two nearly identical shots
landing on either side of a corner can have wildly diverging trajectories.
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A key method for analyzing polygonal billiards is not to think of the ball as bouncing o� the table’s
edge, but instead to imagine that every time the ball hits a wall, it keeps on traveling into a fresh copy
of the table that is �ipped over its edge, producing a mirror image. This process (seen below), called the
unfolding of the billiard path, allows the ball to continue in a straight-line trajectory. By folding the
imagined tables back on their neighbors, you can recover the actual trajectory of the ball. This
mathematical trick makes it possible to prove things about the trajectory that would otherwise be
challenging to see.

For example, it can be used to show why simple rectangular tables have in�nitely many periodic
trajectories through every point. A similar argument holds for any rectangle, but for concreteness,
imagine a table that’s twice as wide as it is long.

Suppose you want to �nd a periodic orbit that crosses the table n times in the long direction and m
times in the short direction. Since each mirror image of the rectangle corresponds to the ball bouncing
o� a wall, for the ball to return to its starting point traveling in the same direction, its trajectory must
cross the table an even number of times in both directions. So m and n must be even. Lay out a grid of
 identical rectangles, each viewed as a mirror image of its neighbors. Draw a line segment from a point
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on the original table to the identical point on a copy n tables away in the long direction and m tables
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away in the short direction. Adjust the original point slightly if the path passes through a corner. Here’s
an example where n = 2 and m = 6. When folded back up, the path produces a periodic trajectory, as
shown in the green rectangle.

A Triangle Inequality

Billiards in triangles, which do not have the nice right-angled geometry of rectangles, is more
complicated. As you might remember from high school geometry, there are several kinds of triangles:
acute triangles, where all three internal angles are less than 90 degrees; right triangles, which have a
90-degree angle; and obtuse triangles, which have one angle that is more than 90 degrees.
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Billiard tables shaped like acute and right triangles have periodic trajectories. But no one knows if the
same is true for obtuse triangles.

To �nd a periodic trajectory in an acute triangle, draw a perpendicular line from each vertex to the
opposite side, as seen to the left, below. Join the points where the right angles occur to form a triangle,
as seen on the right.

This inscribed triangle is a periodic billiard trajectory called the Fagnano orbit, named for Giovanni
Fagnano, who in 1775 showed that this triangle has the smallest perimeter of all inscribed triangles.

In the early 1990s, Fred Holt at the University of Washington and Gregory Galperin and his
collaborators at Moscow State University independently showed that every right triangle has periodic
orbits. One simple way to show this is to re�ect the triangle about one leg and then the other, as shown
below.

Start with a trajectory that’s at a right angle to the hypotenuse (the long side of the triangle). The
hypotenuse and its second re�ection are parallel, so a perpendicular line segment joining them
corresponds to a trajectory that will bounce back and forth forever: The ball departs the hypotenuse at
 a right angle, bounces o� both legs, returns to the hypotenuse at a right angle, and then retraces its
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route.
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But obtuse triangles remain a mystery. In their 1992 paper, Galperin and his collaborators came up with
a variety of methods of re�ecting obtuse triangles in a way that lets you create periodic orbits, but the
methods only worked for some special cases. Then, in 2008, Richard Schwartz at Brown University
showed that all obtuse triangles with angles of 100 degrees or less contain a periodic trajectory. His
approach involved breaking the problem down into multiple cases and verifying each case using
traditional mathematics and computer assistance. In 2018, Jacob Garber, Boyan Marinov, Kenneth
Moore and George Tokarsky at the University of Alberta extended this threshold to 112.3 degrees.
(Tokarsky and Marinov had spent more than a decade chasing this goal.)

A Topological Turn

Another approach has been used to show that if all the angles are rational — that is, they can be
expressed as fractions — obtuse triangles with even bigger angles must have periodic trajectories.
Instead of just copying a polygon on a �at plane, this approach maps copies of polygons onto
topological surfaces, doughnuts with one or more holes in them.

If you re�ect a rectangle over its short side, and then re�ect both rectangles over their longest side,
making four versions of the original rectangle, and then glue the top and bottom together and the left
and right together, you will have made a doughnut, or torus, as shown below. Billiard trajectories on
the table correspond to trajectories on the torus, and vice versa.

In a landmark 1986 article, Howard Masur used this technique to show that all polygonal tables with
rational angles have periodic orbits. His approach worked not only for obtuse triangles, but for far
more complicated shapes: Irregular 100-sided tables, say, or polygons whose walls zig and zag creating
nooks and crannies, have periodic orbits, so long as the angles are rational.

Somewhat remarkably, the existence of one periodic orbit in a polygon implies the existence of
in�nitely many; shifting the trajectory by just a little bit will yield a family of related periodic
trajectories.

The Illumination Problem

 Shapes with nooks and crannies give rise to a related question. Rather than asking about trajectories
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that return to their starting point, this problem asks whether trajectories can visit every point on a
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given table. This is called the illumination problem because we can think about it by imagining a laser
beam re�ecting o� mirrored walls enclosing the billiard table. We ask if, given two points on a
particular table, you can always shine a laser (idealized as an in�nitely thin ray of light) from one point
to the other. To put it another way, if we placed a light bulb, which shines in all directions at once, at
some point on the table, would it light up the whole room?

There have been two main lines of research into the problem: �nding shapes that can’t be illuminated
and proving that large classes of shapes can be. Whereas �nding oddball shapes that can’t be
illuminated can be done through a clever application of simple math, proving that a lot of shapes can be
illuminated has only been possible through the use of heavy mathematical machinery.

In 1958, Roger Penrose, a mathematician who went on to win the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, found a
curved table in which any point in one region couldn’t illuminate any point in another region. For
decades, nobody could come up with a polygon that had the same property. But in 1995, Tokarsky used
a simple fact about triangles to create a blockish 26-sided polygon with two points that are mutually
inaccessible, shown below. That is, a laser beam shot from one point, regardless of its direction, cannot
hit the other point.

The key idea that Tokarsky used when building his special table was that if a laser beam starts at one of
the acute angles in a 45°-45°-90° triangle, it can never return to that corner.

His jagged table is made of 29 such triangles, arranged to make clever use of this fact. In 2019 Amit
Wolecki, then a graduate student at Tel Aviv University, applied this same technique to produce a shape
with 22 sides (shown below). It’s unknown if a shape with fewer sides exists.
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Proving results in the other direction has been a lot harder. In 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani, a
mathematician at Stanford University, became the �rst woman to win the Fields medal, math’s most
prestigious award, for her work on the moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces — a sort of generalization of
the doughnuts that Masur used to show that all polygonal tables with rational angles have periodic
orbits. In 2016, Samuel Lelièvre of Paris-Saclay University, Thierry Monteil of the French National
Center for Scienti�c Research and Barak Weiss of Tel Aviv University applied a number of Mirzakhani’s
results to show that any point in a rational polygon illuminates all points except �nitely many. There
may be isolated dark spots (as in Tokarsky’s and Wolecki’s examples) but no dark regions as there are
in the Penrose example, which has curved walls rather than straight ones. In Wolecki’s 2019 article, he
strengthened this result by proving that there are only �nitely many pairs of unilluminable points.

Sadly, Mirzakhani died in 2017 at age 40, after a struggle with cancer. Her work seemed far removed
from trick shots in pool halls. And yet analyzing billiard trajectories shows how even the most abstract
mathematics can connect to the world we live in.

Correction: February 16, 2024

This story originally said that 22 was the smallest number of sides a polygon containing two interior points
that don’t illuminate one another could have. The story has been updated to re�ect that though the smallest
such polygon known to exist has 22 sides, it remains unknown if a smaller one can be constructed.