Billiards and two-dimensional problems of optimal resistance

Abstract

A body moves in a medium composed of noninteracting point particles; the interaction of the particles with the body is completely elastic. The problem is: find the body's shape that minimizes or maximizes resistance of the medium to its motion. This is the general setting of the optimal resistance problem going back to Newton. Here, we restrict ourselves to the two-dimensional problems for rotating (generally non-convex) bodies. The main results of the paper are the following. First, to any compact connected set with piecewise smooth boundary B ⊂ ℝ2 we assign a measure νB on ∂(conv B)×[-π/2, π/2] generated by the billiard in ℝ2\B and characterize the set of measures {νB}. Second, using this characterization, we solve various problems of minimal and maximal resistance of rotating bodies by reducing them to special Monge-Kantorovich problems. © Springer-Verlag 2008.