The Motion of a Billiard Ball

A video walkthrough of the example page is available online here (Password: SELFORGA22!).

Abstract. We very deeply study the intricate motion of round and coloured billiard balls on a table using a very nice simulation written in D3.js.

Theory

In this completely useless simulation project, the motion of a reflected ball is shown. This is similar to billiard, a fun game shown below.

The ball has a radius of $r = \mathcal{R}$. We describe its dynamics by a vector \[ \vec{v} = (x, y, dx, dy)^T, \] where $x$ and $y$ are the center coordinates of the ball and $dx$ and $dy$ describe the direction the ball is moving in.

Simulation

You can start and pause the simulation and change the radius of the ball using the slider.

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