Date:
Tue, 19/07/2011 - 14:00 - 15:00
When a stringed instrument is played, the sound we hear consists of a fundamental tone and infinitely many harmonic tones. Mathematically, what we ``hear'' is the spectrum of the Laplace operator. In one dimension, the only geometric quantity to be heard is the length of the string. However, in higher dimensions a natural question is: What can we hear? In the 1960s, a popular variation of this question in two dimensions was posed by M.