Carolyn Gordon

Abstract:   Inverse spectral problems ask how much information about an object is encoded in spectral data. For example, Mark Kac's question ``Can you hear the shape of a drum?'' asks whether a plane domain, viewed as a vibrating membrane, is determined by the Dirichlet eigenvalue spectrum of the associated Laplacian, equivalently, by the characteristic frequencies of vibration. We will focus on the analogous question for Riemannian manifolds. We will consider methods for constructing manifolds with the same spectral data and compare examples of such ``sound-alike'' manifolds.