Title: Tiling billiards and interval exchange transformations
Speaker: Diana Davis (Swarthmore College)
Abstract: Tiling billiards is a new dynamical system where a beam of light refracts through a planar tiling. It turns out that, for a regular tiling of the plane by congruent triangles, the light trajectories can be described by interval exchange transformations. I will explain this surprising correspondence, and will also discuss the behavior of the system for other interesting tilings.