Nonconstant Antipedal Area Ratios in Four-Periodic Elliptic Billiards
Manuscript 1 October 2026 · Online 1 October 2026
Abstract
For a periodic elliptic billiard, let A' be the area of the polygon formed by consecutive tangents to the ellipse, and let A*_M be the antipedal area of the original orbit with respect to a fixed point M. We give an exact counterexample to the claimed constancy of A'/A*_M for periods divisible by four, listed as k402 in Table 5 of Reznik, Garcia and Koiller's 2021 article Fifty New Invariants of N-Periodics in the Elliptic Billiard. The denominator is unprimed and the printed point condition is All; taking M to be the center O is allowed. On a standard connected family of convex primitive four-periodic orbits in a fixed noncircular ellipse with one fixed confocal elliptic caustic, put s=a^2+b^2, D=a^2 b^2 and d(t)=(b^2-a^2) sin(t) cos(t). We derive A'/A*_O=D(D+d(t)^2)/(D^2+s^2 d(t)^2), with sharp range [D s^2/(s^2-2D)^2, 1] on the displayed family. For a=4,b=3, two orbits share the caustic with semiaxes 16/5 and 9/5 and give the ratios 1 and 90000/113569. The analytic continuous-family certificate proves reflection and strictly interior caustic tangency; all witness polygons are finite, convex and positively oriented. The four-periodic family and caustic are known geometry and are explicitly credited. This note refutes the literal k402 assertion and frozen dataset record AMR-050-0019 (raw ID 5100019), not every source invariant. A bounded primary-source search did not identify a correction of this exact row but does not certify novelty or absolute priority. Two standalone exact rational checkers accompany the analytic proof. This AI-assisted manuscript is unrefereed; no independent human review or proof-assistant verification is claimed. Alper Ferudun, Mercury Software GmbH. Contact: [email protected]. GitHub: https://github.com/AlperTheKing.
Record
- Affiliation
- Mercury Software GmbH
- Contact
- [email protected] · GitHub
- Result
- Complete counterexample
- Categories
- math.DS · math.MG
- Manuscript
- 1 October 2026
- Online release
- 1 October 2026
- Version
- 1.0
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Files and verification
The PDF is the canonical reading copy. The source archive contains the LaTeX manuscript, bibliography, reproducibility material, and audit documents without build artefacts.
Citation
Alper Ferudun, “Nonconstant Antipedal Area Ratios in Four-Periodic Elliptic Billiards,” EulerSolve Research Papers, AMR-050-0019, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23077039.
BibTeX
@misc{Ferudun2026AMR0500019,
author = {Ferudun, Alper},
title = {Nonconstant Antipedal Area Ratios in Four-Periodic Elliptic Billiards},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {EulerSolve Research Papers},
url = {https://eulersolve.org/papers/amr-050-0019/},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23077039},
note = {AMR-050-0019; unrefereed preprint}
}