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The caustic of a point on a Riemannian manifold is defined as the set of
intersection points of infinitesimally closed geodesics at this point.
A motivating picture for studying billiards is that the billiard
flow can be considered as a limiting case of the geodesic flow.
One can now ask, whether caustics of billiards
can be related to caustics of a family of geodesics starting at a point in
a two-dimensional Riemannian manifold M.
Here, in the case of billiards on tables of constant width, an orbit
tangent to the caustic can actually be extended to an orbit of a geodesic flow
on a sphere.
Oliver Knill
Fri Jun 12 13:34:37 CDT 1998