When you can't hear the shape of a manifold (Q1262598): Difference between revisions

\textit{Marc Kac}'s celebrated article ``Can you hear the shape of a drum?'' [Am. Math. Mon. 73, 1-23 (1966; Zbl 0139.056)] has created a wealth of in part serious, in part folkloristic papers on properties of manifolds that one can or cannot ``hear''. For instance, two years before Kac's article, \textit{J. Milnor} discovered a pair of isospectral, non-isometric manifolds [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 51, 542 (1964; Zbl 0124.312)], and many other results in this spirit are related with the names of R. Brooks, P. Buser, C. Gordon, T. Sunada, H. Urakawa, and M. Vignéras. Loosely speaking, we know now that one can ``hear'' the dimension, the volume, the holes, and certain curvature properties of the manifold, but not its fundamental group, its homology, and its shape. An extensive bibliography on these and related questions may be found in \textit{P. Bérard}'s monograph ``Spectral geometry'' [Lect. Notes Math. 1207 (1986; Zbl 0608.58001)]. In the present note, the author gives an update of developments during the past three years in a suggestive ``geometric'' language.