How to hear the shape of a billiard table

Abstract

The bounce spectrum of a polygonal billiard table is the collection of all bi-infinite sequences of edge labels corresponding to billiard trajectories on the table. We give methods for reconstructing from the bounce spectrum of a polygonal billiard table both the cyclic ordering of its edge labels and the sizes of its angles. We also show that it is impossible to reconstruct the exact shape of a polygonal billiard table from any finite collection of finite words from its bounce spectrum.

40 pages, 19 figures