Dr Vladimir Novikov - Snooker and Coriolis Theorem

"The game of snooker fascinates by a variety and complexity but also by exactness of trajectories of balls on the table. It is remarkable that a movement of a snooker ball can be described by a simple, and, what is even more remarkable, exactly solvable model. A trajectory of a ball can be completely and explicitly expressed in terms of the initial position, velocity of a centre of mass and the initial spin of a ball in an a very elementary way. This problem of movement of a billiard ball on a billiard table was completely solved by a French mathematician Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis yet in 1835 in “Théorie mathématique des effets du jeu de billard”. In this talk I will derive the model of movement of the billiard ball on a billiard table, prove the Coriolis theorem of existence of a first integral of the model and thus integrate the equations of motion."