On the Motion of Billiards in Ellipses

Abstract

For billiards in an ellipse with an ellipse as caustic, there exist canonical coordinates such that the billiard transformation from vertex to vertex is equivalent to a shift of coordinates. A kinematic analysis of billiard motions paves the way to an explicit canonical parametrization of the billiard and even of the associated Poncelet grid. This parametrization uses Jacobian elliptic functions to the numerical eccentricity of the caustic as modulus.