Persistence barcodes and Laplace eigenfunctions on surfaces (Q2312731)

Let $(M,g)$ be a compact Riemannian surface (possibly with boundary) and let $\Delta$ denote the associated Laplace-Beltrami operator. The article under review studies the barcode of a persistence module associated to an $L^2$-normalized linear combination $f$ of eigenfunctions of $\Delta$ with eigenvalues $\leq \lambda$. The main result implies that the total length of the barcode satisfies an upper bound $O(\lambda)$ as $\lambda\to\infty$. For those readers who have never heard of the notion of a persistence module and its associated barcode, the reviewer strongly suggests them to read Subsection 1.2 in the article for a brief and very clear introduction. (The rest of the first section is also very pleasant for reading). According to the authors, ``a persistence barcode is -- roughly speaking -- a collection of intervals in $\mathbb{R}$ which encodes oscillation of $f$''. These notions are very important in data analysis. The proof is motivated and makes use of [the second author and \textit{M. Sodin}, Math. Proc. Camb. Philos. Soc. 143, No. 2, 459--467 (2007; Zbl 1127.58029)], where a similar bound was proved for a different measure of oscillation, the Banach indicatrix of $f$. Furthermore, some applications to approximations by eigenfunctions are given.