Davis–Lelièvre's local-global conjecture for asymmetric pentagonal billiard periods

A combinatorial period length is the number of line segments in a periodic trajectory on the regular pentagon; a trajectory is asymmetric when it does not have 5-fold rotational symmetry. Davis–Lelièvre's local-global conjecture. Every sufficiently large even number arises as an asymmetric combinatorial period length on the regular pentagon. More precisely, every positive even integer except 22, 1212, 1414 and 1818 occurs. This conjecture was motivated by extensive numerical analysis of closed trajectories and concerns the complete set of asymmetric combinatorial period lengths.

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Primary source

Alex Kontorovich and Xin Zhang, “On the Local-Global Conjecture for Combinatorial Period Lengths of Closed Billiards on the Regular Pentagon”, arXiv:2409.10682 (2024).

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