arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Emmanuel Tsukerman.
In this paper, we introduce discrete conics, polygonal analogues of conics. We show that discrete conics satisfy a number of nice properties analogous to those of conics, and arise naturally from several constructions, including the discrete negative pedal construction and an action of a group acting on a focus-sharing pencil of conics.
We study the dynamics of the discrete bicycle (Darboux, Backlund) transformation of polygons in n-dimensional Euclidean space. This transformation is a discretization of the continuous bicycle transformation, recently studied by Foote, Levi, and Tabachnikov. We prove that the respective monodromy is a Moebius transformation. Working toward establishing complete integrability of the discrete bicycle transformation, we describe the monodromy integrals and prove the Bianchi permutability property. We show that the discrete bicycle transformation commutes with the recutting of polygons, a discrete dynamical system, previously studied by V. Adler. We show that a certain center associated with a polygon and discovered by Adler, is preserved under the discrete bicycle transformation. As a case study, we give a complete description of the dynamics of the discrete bicycle transformation on plane quadrilaterals.
We begin by proving a few general facts about Simson polygons, defined as polygons which admit a pedal line. We use an inductive argument to show that no convex $n$-gon, $n\geq5$, admits a Simson Line. We then determine a property which characterizes Simson $n$-gons and show that one can be constructed for every $n\geq3$. We proceed to show that a parabola can be viewed as a limit of special Simson polygons, called equidistant Simson polygons, and that these polygons provide the best piecewise linear continuous approximation to the parabola. Finally, we show that equidistant Simson polygons can be viewed as discrete analogs of parabolas and that they satisfy a number of results analogous to the pedal property, optical property, properties of Archimedes triangles and Lambert's Theorem of parabolas. The corresponding results for parabolas are easily obtained by applying a limit process to the equidistant Simson polygons.
The "Perpendicular Bisectors Construction" is a natural way to seek a replacement for the circumcenter of a noncyclic quadrilateral in the plane. In this paper, we generalize this iterative construction to a construction on polytopes with $n$ vertices in $(n-2)$-dimensional Euclidean, Hyperbolic and Elliptic geometries. We then show that a number of nice properties concerning this iterative construction continue to hold in these geometries. We also introduce an analogue of the isoptic point of a quadrilateral, which is the limit point of the Perpendicular Bisectors Construction, in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ and prove some of its properties.
Given a noncyclic quadrilateral, we consider an iterative procedure producing a new quadrilateral at each step. At each iteration, the vertices of the new quadrilateral are the circumcenters of the triad circles of the previous generation quadrilateral. The main goal of the paper is to prove a number of interesting properties of the limit point of this iterative process. We show that the limit point is the common center of spiral similarities taking any of the triad circles into another triad circle. As a consequence, the point has the isoptic property (i.e., all triad circles are visible from the limit point at the same angle). Furthermore, the limit point can be viewed as a generalization of a circumcenter. It also has properties similar to those of the isodynamic point of a triangle. We also characterize the limit point as the unique point for which the pedal quadrilateral is a parallelogram. Continuing to study the pedal properties with respect to a quadrilateral, we show that for every quadrilateral there is a unique point (which we call the Simson point) such that its pedal consists of four points on line, which we call the Simson line, in analogy to the case of a triangle. Finally, we define a version of isogonal conjugation for a quadrilateral and prove that the isogonal conjugate of the limit point is a parallelogram, while that of the Simson point is a degenerate quadrilateral whose vertices coincide at infinity.