15 years of EDAÍ, 30 years of Billiards
Sonia Pinto de Carvalho (UFMG)

The billiards problem consists of the straight-line motion of a particle within the region bounded by a curve, making elastic reflection on impacts with the edge, i.e., exactly what is imagined, except that the table does not have pockets, nor does it have to be rectangular. This problem defines a very special class of discrete, two-dimensional, conservative dynamical systems. In 2014, at the EDAI meeting in Juiz de Fora, I presented the first results we had on the genetic dynamics of flat billiards. In this new talk I will tell what the team has done in the last nine years, with new results on flat billiards, on billiards on surfaces, and on random billiards, and some of the problems we are working on today. Our team has grown and today is composed of Cássio Morais (postdoc UFMG), Cláudia Ferreira (IFET MG), Geraldo Gonçalves (UFOP), José Pedro Gaivao (Univ. Lisboa), Josué Damasceno (UFOP), Luciano Coutinho dos Santos (CEFET/MG), Mário Jorge Dias Carneiro (UFMG), Rafael Pereira (postdoc UFMG), Reginaldo Batista (UFJF), Sylvie Oliffson Kamphorst (UFMG), Túlio Ferreira (UFU), Vitor Almeida (PUC Minas) and myself.