A Correspondence between Billiards and Geodesics

Abstract

From a geometric viewpoint, billiard trajectories and geodesics are related by mutual approximation results. In one direction, it is known that every geodesic curve on the boundary of a smooth convex body can be approximated by a sequence of billiard trajectories inside of it. We establish the other direction by proving that, for Riemannian billiard tables (under mild assumptions), there are families of fold-type surfaces such that every sequence of geodesic segments on these surfaces has a subsequence that converges to a billiard trajectory in the table. In particular, this is true for convex Euclidean tables. We also describe a more general class of tables for which this result holds and present explicit non-convex examples.