Sébastien Labbé

A tamer wants to escape within a circle without being eaten by a lion who lives on the circle. The speed of the lion is 4 times that of the tamer. How can the tamer escape? There is a nice and clever solution in 2d, but does the naive solution where the tamer always moves oppositely to the lion works? In November 2009, a small script written in Sage by Xavier Provençal and Sébastien Labbé in Montpellier answers the question. To create the animation, download the script tamer.sage and run the commands:

sage: load tamer.sage
sage: l = range(0,1200,10)
sage: a = anime(l)
sage: a
Animation with 120 frames
sage: show(a)

How can the tamer escape? Can you find the solution?