Four-cusp conjecture for caustics by reflection in ellipses

Let CC be an ellipse and let OO be an interior point that is not a focus of CC. For each n1n\geq 1, the nn-th caustic by reflection from OO is the envelope of the family of billiard trajectories after nn reflections from CC. Four-cusp conjecture. For all n1n\geq 1, this caustic has exactly four cusps, and all four are ordinary cusps. This refines the known lower bound of four cusps for the caustics by reflection from a generic interior point of an oval; the n=1n=1 case without the ordinary-cusp assertion is related to Jacobi's Last Geometric Statement, while the general claim remains open.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Gil Bor, Mark Spivakovsky and Serge Tabachnikov, “Cusps of caustics by reflection in ellipses”, arXiv:2406.11074 (2024).

Additional references

4 papers in this index state this conjecture (2013–2024). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2112.07852, arXiv:1304.0907, arXiv:1303.4178.

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