Sharing Ricky Reusser’s ‘Periodic Planar Three-Body Orbits” program with my son

I saw an really neat idea in a tweet from Nalini Joshi yesterday:

Would you like to see “2229 periodic solutions of the planar three-body problem”? https://t.co/3VDHRCjKL8

— Nalini Joshi (@monsoon0) October 19, 2019

A direct link to Ricky Reusser’s incredible 3-body problem visualization is here:

Ricky Reusser’s amazing 3-body problem visualization

For today’s math project I asked my son to play around with the program and pick three examples that he found interesting. The discussion of those three examples is below.

Here’s the first one, with a short discussion of three body problem at the start:

Next up was an orbit shaped almost like an infinity symbol:

Finally, an orbit that it completely amazing – I almost can’t believe a shape like this is possible!