Four-cusp conjecture for caustics by reflection in ellipses
Four-cusp conjecture for caustics by reflection in ellipses
Let be an ellipse and let be an interior point that is not a focus of . For each , the -th caustic by reflection from is the envelope of the family of billiard trajectories after reflections from . Four-cusp conjecture. For all , 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 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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