Boris Khesin

This document collects contributions to the Open Problem List in Billiards and Quantitative Symplectic Geometry, compiled following discussions during the workshop ``Billiards and quantitative symplectic geometry'' that took place at the University of Heidelberg on July 14--18, 2025.

We discuss and draw the reader's attention to several passages in Vladimir Arnold's note on the epigraph to the novel in verse "Evgenii Onegin" by A$.$S$.$Pushkin, as well as to puzzles hidden in the novel by the poet himself.

We define a new class of plane billiards – the “pensive billiard” – in which the billiard ball travels along the boundary for some distance depending on the incidence angle before reflecting, while preserving the billiard rule of equality of the angles of incidence and reflection. This generalizes so-called “puck billiards” proposed by M. Bialy, as well as a “vortex billiard,” that is, the motion of a point vortex dipole in two-dimensional hydrodynamics on domains with boundary. We prove the variational origin and invariance of a symplectic structure for pensive billiards, as well as study their properties including conditions for a twist map, the existence of periodic orbits, etc. We also demonstrate the appearance of both the golden and silver ratios in the corresponding hydrodynamical vortex setting. Finally, we introduce and describe basic properties of pensive outer billiards.

In this paper we propose a gauge-theoretic approach to the problems of optimal mass transport for vector and matrix densities. This resolves both the issues of positivity and action transitivity constraints. Bures-type metrics on the corresponding semi-direct product groups of diffeomorphisms and gauge transformations are related to Wasserstein-type metrics on vector half-densities and matrix densities via Riemannian submersions. We also describe their relation to Poisson geometry and demonstrate how the momentum map allows one to prove the Riemannian submersion properties. The obtained geodesic equations turn out to be vector versions of the Burgers equations.

We study curvatures of the groups of measure-preserving diffeomorphisms of non-orientable compact surfaces. For the cases of the Klein bottle and the real projective plane we compute curvatures, their asymptotics and the normalised Ricci curvatures in many directions. Extending the approach of Arnold and Lukatskii we provide estimates of weather unpredictability for natural models of trade wind currents on the Klein bottle and the projective plane.

The non-transitivity without extra constraints in the Euler equation in any dimension is almost evident and can be derived, e.g. from Morse theory.

We give a classification of generic coadjoint orbits for the group of area-preserving diffeomorphisms of a closed non-orientable surface. This completes V. Arnold's program of studying invariants of incompressible fluids in 2D. As an auxiliary problem, we also classify simple Morse pseudo-functions on non-orientable surfaces up to area-preserving diffeomorphisms.

We introduce and study a simple model capturing the main features of unbalanced optimal transport. It is based on equipping the conical extension of the group of all diffeomorphisms with a natural metric, which allows a Riemannian submersion to the space of volume forms of arbitrary total mass. We describe its finite-dimensional version and present a concise comparison study of the geometry, Hamiltonian features, and geodesics for this and other extensions. One of the corollaries of this approach is that along any geodesic the total mass evolves with constant acceleration, as an object's height in a constant buoyancy field.