Mathematical billiards is much like the real game: a point mass, representing the ball, rolls in a straight line on a (perfectly friction-less) table, striking the sides according to the law of reflection. A billiard trajectory is then completely characterized by the number of elastic collisions. The rules of mathematical billiards may be simple, but the possible behaviours of billiard trajectories are endless. In fact, several fundamental theory questions in mathematics can be recast as billiards problems. A billiard trajectory is called a periodic orbit if the number of distinct collisions in the trajectory is finite. We show that periodic orbits on such billiard tables cannot have an odd number of distinct collisions. We classify all possible equivalence classes of periodic orbits on square and rectangular tables. We also present a connection between the number of different equivalence classes and Euler’s totient function, which for any positive integer N, counts how many positive integers smaller than N share no common divisor with N other than $1$. We explore how to construct periodic orbits with a prescribed (even) number of distinct collisions and investigate properties of inadmissible (singular) trajectories, which are trajectories that eventually terminate at a vertex (a table corner).

Leonetti and Luca [‘On the iterates of the shifted Euler’s function’, Bull. Aust. Math. Soc., to appear] have shown that the integer sequence $(x_n)_{n\geq 1}$ defined by $x_{n+2}=\phi (x_{n+1})+\phi (x_{n})+k$, where $x_1,x_2\geq 1$, $k\geq 0$ and $2 \mid k$, is bounded by $4^{X^{3^{k+1}}}$, where $X=(3x_1+5x_2+7k)/2$. We improve this result by showing that the sequence $(x_n)$ is bounded by $2^{2X^2+X-3}$, where $X=x_1+x_2+2k$.

We investigate, for given positive integers a and b, the least positive integer $c=c(a,b)$ such that the quotient $\varphi (c!\kern-1.2pt)/\varphi (a!\kern-1.2pt)\varphi (b!\kern-1.2pt)$ is an integer. We derive results on the limit of $c(a,b)/(a+b)$ as a and b tend to infinity and show that $c(a,b)>a+b$ for all pairs of positive integers $(a,b)$, with the exception of a set of density zero.

Let ${\mathcal{A}}$ be a star-shaped polygon in the plane, with rational vertices, containing the origin. The number of primitive lattice points in the dilate $t{\mathcal{A}}$ is asymptotically $\frac{6}{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}^{2}}\text{Area}(t{\mathcal{A}})$ as $t\rightarrow \infty$. We show that the error term is both $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}_{\pm }(t\sqrt{\log \log t})$ and $O(t(\log t)^{2/3}(\log \log t)^{4/3})$. Both bounds extend (to the above class of polygons) known results for the isosceles right triangle, which appear in the literature as bounds for the error term in the summatory function for Euler’s $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}(n)$.

Let r be an integer greater than 1, and let A be a finite, nonempty set of nonzero integers. We obtain a lower bound for the number of positive squarefree integers n, up to x, for which the products ∏ p∣n(p+a) (over primes p) are perfect rth powers for all the integers a in A. Also, in the cases where A={−1} and A={+1}, we will obtain a lower bound for the number of such n with exactly r distinct prime factors.