Combinatorics of periodic ellipsoidal billiards

Abstract

We study combinatorics of billiard partitions which arose recently in the description of periodic trajectories of ellipsoidal billiards in d-dimensional Euclidean and pseudo-Euclidean spaces. Such partitions uniquely codify the sets of caustics, up to their types, which generate periodic trajectories. The period of a periodic trajectory is the largest part while the winding numbers are the remaining summands of the corresponding partition. In order to take into account the types of caustics as well, we introduce weighted partitions and provide closed forms for the generating functions of these partitions.