I'm so bad at billiards that I ended up in the hyperbolic plane [video]

Posted by surprisetalk 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by ChrisbyMe 9 hours ago

This entire youtube channel is a gem btw.

Delightful video on the lambda calculus and other compution concepts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcVA8Nj6HEo

Comment by mkw5053 9 hours ago

Thanks for sharing. I remember reading Introduction to Lambda Calculus many years ago and it was one of those times where I had crazy math dreams and would wonder around SF convinced everything is functions. Like literally everything.

Comment by mkw5053 54 minutes ago

s/wonder/wander (although wonder kind of accidentally works too)

Comment by sublinear 8 hours ago

I miss having the crazy math dreams I used to get when I was in college. If only life could be an endless stream of turning over new stones.

Comment by fasterik 3 hours ago

I wonder if it's an age/brain development thing. I also had crazy math and programming dreams in my early 20s. I don't get those any more, though I still spend a lot of waking time (possibly more now than back then) obsessing over math and programming problems.

Comment by whoanoway 15 minutes ago

[dead]

Comment by enatiello 21 minutes ago

Stay down. After your shot, don't stand up right away.

Comment by nomilk 6 hours ago

The emergent patterns are... stunning. Especially the ones around 2m35s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL9BTbIGxLg&t=2m35s

Comment by knodi123 47 minutes ago

I saw a video series long ago where a guy kept playing with shapes algorithmically like this, and his catch phrase was something like "oops, I made a fractal again". Wish I could find it!

Comment by laxatives 2 hours ago

I gotta know if the music is relating to the math or image in a generative way or if its just vibes/style.

Comment by TACD 18 minutes ago

The music is by 6884; the track for this video (I assume commissioned specifically for it) is available here: https://6884.bandcamp.com/album/outer-billiards

Comment by buildbot 8 hours ago

Wow this is stunningly beautiful and extremely cool. And I learned something I had never heard about.

BRB going to go make hyperbolic outer billards art

Comment by sirnicolaz 49 minutes ago

LSD is worse

Comment by thinkingtoilet 44 minutes ago

Very rare to see such visual beauty in math like this. Well done.

Comment by dlcarrier 5 hours ago

I will never cease to be amazed by the range of thought experiments that get published as math papers.

Comment by RogerL 54 minutes ago

The video didn't make this clear, but it is answering real questions. Its used in the study of geometrical optics, celestial navigation, etc. Ie set up a 'toy' problem that gives you insights into rather more complicated dynamical systems.

From Tabachnikov's book Geometry and Billiards:

Classical mechanics and geometrical optics, discussed in this chapter, are intimately related. The configuration trajectories of mechanical systems are extremals of a variational principle, similar to the trajectories of light. In fact, mechanics can be described as akind of geometrical optics; this was Hamilton’s approach to mechanics(see [3] for details). The brachistochrone problem is a good example of this optics-mechanics analogy.

Comment by brador 4 hours ago

This is math junk food. Pretty though.

Comment by RogerL 59 minutes ago

The video contains no equations, but it cites original, ongoing, research that has been going on since the 50s. Sure, you could rip a bong and go "woah, cool colors", or you could follow the links and read, say, Tabachnikov's book.

Personally I found that the videos instantly made some group theory aspects of this stand out. Maybe I'm completely off, and that's not really how this is approached, but now I have a question/idea as a foil which I can use to look a bit deeper. In any case, the animation SW came from a researcher in the field, I don't think they are doing this to generate junk food, but to solve actual problems in their field.

Comment by nkrisc 3 hours ago

How so? I think applied mathematics is the exception.

Comment by bayindirh 3 hours ago

It made me reconsider what I think about mathematics in general. So, if it was junk food, it was a nutritious one at that.

Comment by fasterik 4 hours ago

I would call it art, not junk food.

Comment by zkmon 1 hour ago

Entire math is junk food. Real animals don't touch that.

Comment by nkrisc 12 minutes ago

That’s not entirely true. There are parts of mathematics that have useful real world applications. Sometimes even the parts we thought were esoteric and abstract turn out to have applications that were not conceived of yet at the time of discovery.

Comment by temp0826 8 hours ago

Shooting pool with dmt entities right here

Comment by globular-toast 3 hours ago

Youtube quality really let's stuff like this down.

Comment by ngcazz 2 hours ago

oddly I felt like the compression artefacting during the hyperbolic part enhanced the psychedelic effect

Comment by Keyframe 3 hours ago

Great, but audio and audio mix is absolutely horrendous and super turbo 2.0 annoying. So much so I had to turn it off and read CC.

Comment by jaapz 3 hours ago

I liked it, felt right for the video

Comment by Keyframe 3 hours ago

I think it might be the mix and the (low) level of voice over background and the stereo image combined with what I am listening on that makes me uncomfortable for some reason.