Mark Berezovik (Tel Aviv University)
Abstract: In this talk I will discuss a link between billiards in convex planar domains and Hofer’s geometry. For smooth strictly convex billiard tables the Hofer distance between the corresponding billiard ball maps admits an upper bound in terms of a simple geometric distance between the tables. Using this result one can embed the billiard ball map of a convex polygon in the completion, with respect to Hofer’s metric, of the group of smooth area-preserving maps of the annulus. This talk is based on joint work with Konstantin Kliakhandler, Yaron Ostrover, and Leonid Polterovich.