Poincaré Disk — Geodesic Billiards

Geodesic flow on the hyperbolic plane — perfect chaos, Anosov mixing

Hyperbolic Geometry

The Poincaré disk is a model of the hyperbolic plane H²: the open unit disk with metric ds² = 4(dx²+dy²)/(1-r²)² giving constant curvature K=−1.

Geodesics are circular arcs meeting the boundary at right angles (or diameters). The {p,q} tessellation tiles H² with p-gons meeting q at each vertex — infinitely many fit inside the disk.

Geodesic flow on negatively curved surfaces is Anosov: uniformly hyperbolic, ergodic, mixing, and Bernoulli — the prototype of mathematical chaos. Nearby trajectories diverge exponentially at rate equal to the curvature.

hyperbolic geometry Anosov flow ergodic theory Möbius transform